I hope that those of you attending the PNWA’s annual shindig this weekend will pardon my delaying the promised final post on writing conferences — after the tragic events of Thursday night and Friday morning, I felt that we could all use a bit of a breather from stark reality. Besides, I thought my online time would be better used responding to individual questions: I’ve heard from about a dozen conference attendees who have apparently been taking breaks between sessions to nip back to their respective hotel rooms, log onto the Internet, and shoot me a question about pitching. Or look up a how-to in the Author! Author! archives. Or just to remind themselves that, contrary to what eager aspiring writers often hear from the dais at writers’ conferences, the outlook for publishing is not all gloom and doom.

We try to be upbeat here at Author! Author! Which is why what I’m about to tell those of you who have just successfully pitched your work to an agent or editor may come as something of a surprise: no matter how excited you are about receiving a request for pages, do not even consider sending your manuscript to that agent or editor right away. Take the time to re-read it yourself first.

Half of you just turned pale with dread, right? “But Anne,” post-pitch writers everywhere exclaim, “that will take hours, or maybe even days! I want to get this out the door!”

Of course you do; it’s tremendously exciting when a real, live agent or editor wants to read your work. If you’re like most conference pitchers, you’re probably thinking that it would be a good idea to get it under his or her nose as soon as humanly possible, while s/he is still excited about it. Or, to put it more cynically, while s/he still remembers your pitch.

That’s an understandable impulse, but relax — pitch-hearers typically take good notes; they also often hear dozens of pitches at any given conference. That means, in practice, that you don’t need to rely upon that agent or editor’s memory of your pitch to guarantee a warm reception for the requested pages. All you have to do is include a cover letter thanking the agent or editor for asking for your manuscript.

And, realistically, yours is not going to be the only manuscript that agent or editor has requested over the last six months. That means, to get cynical again for a moment, that no matter how excited that agent or editor seemed to be about your book concept, it’s not standard practice for them to clear their schedules immediately after returning from a writers’ conference in order to read all of the requested materials super-eager writers will have e-mailed within hours of the pitch meeting. Nor do they tend to stand by the incoming mail chute, fretting about why that writer has not yet mailed that manuscript. Why, it’s been a whole week!

Trust me, that’s not going to happen. Contrary to what you may have heard on the conference rumor mill or read on the Internet, there’s no ambient expectation that a writer will send requested materials the day she receives the request, or even within a few weeks. Nor will cranking out pages instantly win a pitcher Brownie points at most agencies. Especially if, as is so often and so unfortunately the case with super-swift submissions, the manuscript is not either professionally formatted or what the pros call clean: free of typos, spelling gaffes, missing words, grammar problems, or any other writing faux pas that might detract — and distract — from the quality of the writing.

Translation: you not only have time to make sure that every word in those pages creates precisely the impression you want; it’s very much in your best interest to make the time to do it. You have time to spell-check; you have time to grammar-check; you have time to fine-tune characterization. That being the case, and knowing that any well-established agent receives enough well-written, book category-appropriate, perfectly clean manuscripts in any given year to fill the agency’s new client requirements many times over, why would a savvy writer not be willing to take the time to make sure that his work will make the best possible impression?

That question is not entirely rhetorical, by the way. Our old pal, Millicent the agency screener, mutters it above promising-but-flawed submissions pretty much every day of conference season.

See why I was a trifle reluctant to dump that much hard reality upon everyone when the national news was already depressing? Don’t worry; the rest of this post will be much more upbeat. It will, however, be stuffed to the gills with practical advice about handling yourself professionally in a pitching situation — and after the fact.

But first, let’s cheer ourselves up by contemplating the photo at the top of this post. That’s an actual stone in my yard, believe it or not, one that apparently went out of its way to anthropomorphize itself for my illustrative pleasure. If rocks can be that helpful and friendly, it gives me great hope for human beings.

It also reminds me of a friendly hillside that featured prominently in one of the UNCLE WIGGLY books, but that’s not why I like to run this photograph every year when I talk about pitching. I post it to remind all of you writers brave enough to sit down in front of an agent or editor and make an argument for your book that getting into print is often a long haul, even for the most beautifully-written manuscript or most trenchant book proposal.

You’re going to want to pace yourself.

Part of pacing your efforts involves — and you may well have seen this coming — not becoming so excited about a successful pitch or query that you submit your writing to professional scrutiny before it’s sufficiently polished. As we discussed last time, no matter how well you and the agent or editor to whom you pitched your book seemed to hit it off, no professional reader in his right mind would take on a manuscript simply because she liked the writer, or even because the pitch sounded good. Unless you happen to be a celebrity, a pro’s decision about whether to take on a manuscript is based primarily upon — wait for it — the manuscript.

Or, as agents and editors like to say, “It all depends on the writing.”

That often comes as a gigantic surprise to writers riding the heady adrenaline rush of having given a successful conference pitch. It also, unfortunately, also tends to come as a huge surprise to writers whose pitches were greeted with, “No, thanks,” as well as the many, many conference-attending writers that do not work up the nerve to pitch at all.

There’s a pretty good reason for that, actually: the overwhelming majority of writers’ conferences that feature pitching imply in their literature that if a pitch is good enough, the agent or editor hearing it will sign the writer on the spot. Since that simply does not happen — chant it with me now: no agent in her right mind would take on a manuscript or book proposal without reading it — it’s not altogether astonishing that writers that walk into conferences with this expectation often walk out of even the most successful pitch feeling somewhat let down.

Equally understandably, given such unrealistic expectations, they often walk into their pitch meetings believing that presentation is more important than substance. First-time pitchers often harbor fears of inadvertently making a poor impression upon an agent or editor in a social situation, thereby nullifying their chances of being able to wow ‘em with a pitch in a formal meeting.

I wish I could say that this is an unfounded fear, but actually, it’s pretty reasonable: one doesn’t have to spend much time hanging around that bar that’s never more than 100 yards from any writers’ conference in North America to hear a few horror stories about jaw-droppingly rude writers. And I don’t know about you, but one of my more dubious gifts as a human being is an uncanny ability to find the most institutionally powerful person in the room and catch him in a misstatement or crack a joke that skewers his ego, generally before I know who he is.

Hard to imagine how this particular trait would have provided my ancestors with enough of a survival advantage to justify its being passed down the evolutionary line, but I do seem to have been born with it. Many are the family stories about the toddler critiquing the pediatrician’s sartorial choices.

Honestly, does anybody look good in those tacky white polyester coats?

Before any of my fellow compulsive truth-tellers begin to panic, let me hasten to add that agents’ and editors’ anecdotes are almost invariably about genuinely outrageous approach attempts, not minor faux pas. And that’s not just because “You’re not going to believe this, but a pitcher just forgot to tell me whether is book is fiction or nonfiction” isn’t nearly as likely to garner sympathetic murmurs from fellow bar denizens as “This insane writer just grabbed my arm as I was rushing into the bathroom and refused to stop talking for 20 minutes.”

For one thing, the former is too common a phenomenon to excite much of a response from other agents. Unhappily, though, the latter happens often enough that some agents turn against hallway pitching for life. As, indeed, many a product of the post-conference rumor mill can attest.

However — and this is a big however — in my experience, the aspiring writers who sit around and fret about being the objects of such anecdotes are virtually never the folks that ought to be worrying about it. These are not the kind of gaffes that your garden-variety well-mannered person is likely to commit.

The result: polite people end up tiptoeing around conferences, terrified of doing the wrong thing, while the rude stomp around like Godzilla with P.M.S. And then, once an agent who has been smashed into by one Godzilla too many complains on a blog or in an interview about how impolite writers are, the naturally courteous cringe, while the rude remain unfazed. Thus are the polite rendered more and more fearful of running afoul of an unspoken rule or two.

Case in point: a technologically-savvy reader wrote in a couple of years back to ask if it was considered appropriate to take notes on a laptop, iPad, or phone during conference seminars. It’s still not very common (surprising, given how computer-bound most of us are these days) but yes, it is acceptable, under two conditions.

First, if you do not sit in a very prominent space in the audience — and not solely because of the tap-tap-tap sound you’ll be making. Believe it or not, it’s actually rather demoralizing for a lecturer to look out at a sea of faces that are all staring at their laps. Are these people bored out of their minds, the worried speaker wonders, or merely taking notes very intensely?

Don’t believe me? The next time you attend a lecture of any sort, keep your eyes on the speaker’s face, rather than on your notes, your Blackberry, or that Octavia Butler novel you’ve hidden in your lap because you can’t believe that your boss is making you sit through a talk on the importance of conserving paper clips for the third time this year.

I guarantee that within two minutes, the speaker will be addressing half of his comments directly to you; consistent, animated-faced attention is THAT unusual in a lecture environment. The bigger the audience, the more quickly she will focus upon the one member visibly interested in what he is saying.

Heck, at the university where I used to teach, active listening was so rare that occasionally, one or another of my colleagues would get so carried away with appreciation that he would marry a particularly attentive student. One trembles to think what these men would have done had they been gripping enough lecturers to animate an entire room.

Back to the iPad issue. It’s also considered, well, considerate to ask the speaker before the class if it is all right to use any electronic device during the seminar, be it computer, iPhone, or tape recorder.

Why? Think about it: if your head happens to be apparently focused upon your screen, how is the speaker to know that you’re not just checking your e-mail? If you grin suddenly, how can the speaker be sure that it was at the one-liner she just tossed off, and not at some friend’s quip on Facebook? Also, in these decadent days, when the antics of unwary pets and clumsy humans often go viral, how may a speaker be sure that you are not recording her with an eye to posting her speech beneath unflattering lighting on YouTube?

Enough about the presenters’ problems; let’s move on to yours. Do be aware that attending a conference, particularly your first, can be a bit overwhelming. You’re going to want to– and this should sound familiar by now — pace yourself.

“But Anne!” conference brochure-clutching writers everywhere pipe up. “The schedule is jam-packed with offerings, many of which overlap temporally! I don’t want to miss a thing!”?

Yes, it’s tempting to take every single class and listen to every speaker, but frankly, you’re going to be a better pitcher if you allow yourself to take occasional breaks. Cut yourself some slack; don’t book yourself for the entire time.

Why? Well, let me ask you this: would you rather be babbling incoherently during the last seminar of the weekend, or raising your hand to ask a coherent question?

Before you answer that, allow me to add: since most attendees’ brains are mush by the end of the conference, it’s generally easier to get close to an agent or editor who teaches a class on the final day. Fewer lines, less competition.

Do make a point of doing something other than lingering in the conference center for three or four days straight. Go walk around the block. Sit in the sun. Grab a cup of coffee with that fabulous literary fiction writer you just met. Hang out in the bar that’s never more than 100 yards from any writers’ conference; that tends to be where the already-agented and already-published hang out, anyway.

And don’t you dare feel guilty about doing any of these things. Skipping the occasional seminar does not constitute being lax about pursuing professional opportunities: it is smart strategy, to make sure you’re fresh for your pitches. If you can’t tear yourself away, take a few moments to close your eyes and take a few deep breaths, to reset your internal pace from PANIC! to I’m-Doing-Fine.

I know that I sound like an over-eager Lamaze coach on this point, but I can’t overemphasize the importance of reminding yourself to keep breathing throughout the conference. A particularly good time for a nice lung-filling is immediately after you sit down in front of an agent or editor.

Trust me: your brain could use the oxygen right around then. It will help you calm down so you can make your most effective pitch.

And at the risk of sounding like the proverbial broken record, please, please, PLEASE don’t expect a conference miracle. Writing almost never sells on pitches alone, no matter how many times you have heard that apocryphal story about THE HORSE WHISPERER. You are not going to really know what an agent thinks about your work until she has read some of it.

Wait — haven’t I heard something like that before?

Seriously, it’s almost unheard-of for an agent to sign up a client during a conference — and it’s been practically unheard-of since roughly the advent of the personal computer. So I have no idea why so many conference-organizers blithely hand out feedback forms asking if you found an agent at the event. Even the most successful conference pitchers generally don’t receive an offer for weeks, if not months.

See how having realistic expectations can help improve the conference experience, even in retrospect? Remember, your goal here is not to be discovered on the spot, but to get the industry pro in front of you to ask to read your writing. Period.

Yes, I know: I’ve said this before. Repeatedly. And I’m going to keep saying it as long as there are aspiring writers out there who walk into pitch meetings expecting to hear the agent cry, “My God, that’s the best premise since OLIVER TWIST! Here’s a representation contract — and look, here’s my favorite editor now. Let’s see if he’s interested. I want this book sold by midnight!”?

Then, of course, the editor falls equally in love with it, offers an advance large enough to cover New Hampshire in $20 bills, and the book is out by Christmas. As an Oprah’s Book Club selection, naturally, even though neither the Oprah show nor her book club exist anymore.

Long-time readers, chant along with me now: this is not how the publishing industry works. This is not how the publishing industry works. This is not how the publishing industry works…

Did I say that you could stop repeating it?

The key to being a happy conference-goer — and, even more importantly, a happy post-conference writer — is not only to realize that the popular conception of how books move from manuscript to publication is dead wrong, but to believe it. Having to make a significant effort in order to get an agent to read your manuscript is normal.

Thus the appeal of conference pitching: done well, it will allow you to skip the querying stage and pass directly to the submission stage. So being asked to send pages is a terrific outcome for this situation, not a distant second place to an imaginary reality.

Admittedly, though, that is easy to forget in the throes of a pitch meeting. Almost as easy as forgetting that a request to submit is not a promise to represent or publish. Out comes the broken record again:

Whatever an agent or editor says to you in a conference situation is just a conversation at a conference, not the Sermon on the Mount or testimony in front of a Congressional committee. There is no such thing as an implied offer of representation or publication; there are only concrete offers and preliminary conversations. Everything is provisional until some paper has changed hands.

This is equally true, incidentally, whether your conference experience includes an agent who actually starts drooling visibly with greed while you were pitching or an editor in a terrible mood who raves for 15 minutes about how the public isn’t buying books anymore. (Not true, incidentally.) Until you sign a mutually-binding contract, no promises — or condemnation, for that matter — should be inferred or believed absolutely.

Try to maintain perspective. If you can’t, stop and take a few deep breaths.

Admittedly, perspective is genuinely hard to achieve when a real, live agent says, “Sure, send me the first chapter,” especially if you’ve been shopping the book around for eons. But it is vital to keep in the back of your mind that eliciting this request is not the end of your job as a marketer. To slap another golden oldie from the broken record collection on the turntable:

Regardless of how much any given agent or editor says she loves your pitch, she’s not going to make an actual decision until she’s read at least part of it. And she’s not going to clear her schedule for the rest of the month to read it, either.

So even if you are over the moon about positive response from the agent of your dreams, please, I beg you, do not stop pitching to any other agent that might conceivably be a good fit for your book. Try to generate as many requests to see your work as you can.

Why, yes, you’re right: that is going to be a heck of a lot of work. Your point?

No matter who says yes to you first, you will be much, much happier two months from now if you have a longer requested submissions list. Ultimately, going to a conference to pitch only twice, when there are 20 agents in the building, is just not efficient.

Far too many aspiring writers will just give up after one successful pitch, assuming, often wrongly, that a friendly pitch meeting means a predisposition to like a submission or an implied promise to read it quickly. It doesn’t, and it isn’t. So it is very much in your interest to send out submissions to several agents at once, rather than one at a time.

I heard that gasp, but no, there is absolutely nothing unethical about this, unless (a) one of the agencies has a policy precluding multiple submissions (rare) or (b) you actively promised one agent an exclusive. (I would emphatically discourage you from granting (b), by the way — and if you don’t know why, please see the EXCLUSIVES TO AGENTS category at right before you even consider pitching at a conference.)

Some of you look concerned, but trust me, this is what the agents will be expecting you to do. If an agent wants an exclusive peek, she will ask for one point-blank; there’s no such thing as a tacit request for a solo submission. By all means, tell each of the agents in the cover letter that others are looking at it, but don’t make the hugely pervasive mistake of granting an effective exclusive that the agent does not expect, simply because she was the one you liked best.

I see some of you blushing: you were thinking that, weren’t you, conference-goers? Or you have in the past, and then ended up waiting six months to hear back from that agent. Or did not hear back at all, right?

“Wow, Anne!” gasp those of you who have lived through this highly unpleasant experience. “What kind of a crystal ball are you wielding these days? That’s precisely what happened to me!”

No crystal ball needed on this one: it happens to pitchers all the time. They misunderstand the level of connection they made with agents at conferences, committing themselves in principle before the agents in question have even seen their work. “Well, we just clicked,” these writers say.

What they tend not to add is that let’s face it, it’s a heck of a lot less work — not to mention less wearing on the nerves — to send out one submission than, say, seven or eight. It’s also less stressful not to keep querying while that nice agent from the conference considers your submission.

And then one sad day, months after the conference, pitchers that think this way receive the rejection, often as a form letter. “What happened?” one-at-a-timers cry. “I thought we clicked! And now I feel like it’s too late to send out those requested materials to other agents.”

Actually, if less than a year has passed since the conference, it isn’t. But just think how much happier a writer who could say, “Well, I’m sad that the agent I liked best decided against representing my book, but at least those four other agents are still considering it,” would be in that moment. Or even one in a position to sigh with relief and murmur, “Wow, am I ever glad that I kept querying throughout these last six months. Now, I have other requests for materials.”

Besides, your time is valuable: sending out those post-conference submissions one at a time, waiting for a response from each before moving on to the next, could eat up months. Years, even, if you’re dealing with agencies that practice the increasingly common rejection tactic of simply never contacting the writer if the answer is no.

Yes, really. Even if the agent requested the entire manuscript. See now why a savvy writer never grants a tacit exclusive?

Just mention in your cover letter to each that other agents are also reading it, and keep moving forward. Trust me, hearing that it’s a multiple submission not going to annoy anyone that did not explicitly tell you that he does not expect an exclusive peek. That old saw about agents’ getting insulted if you don’t submit one at a time is absolutely untrue. Let’s toss another broken record onto the turntable:

Unless an agent asks for an exclusive look at your work, it’s neither expected nor in your interest to act as if s/he has. In fact, hearing that others are interested may even make your book seem more attractive.

Yet another reason you should keep on pitching in those hallways: it tends to be a trifle easier to get to yes than in a formal pitch. Counter-intuitive, isn’t it? Yet in many ways, casual pitches are more persuasive.

Why? For one simple reason: time. In a hallway pitch, agents will often automatically tell a writer to submit the first chapter, simply in order to be able to keep on walking down the hall, finish loading salad onto their plates, or be able to move on to the next person in line after the agents’ forum.

Seriously, it’s true. If the agent handles your type of work, the premise is interesting, and you are polite, he will usually hand you his business cards and say, “Send me the first 50 pages.”

Okay, pop quiz to see who has been paying attention over the past few days. After the agent says this, do you:

(a) regard it as an invitation to talk about your work at greater length?

(b) regard it as an invitation to a lifetime of friendship?

(c) regard it as a promise to make you the next bestselling author?

(d) say, “Gee, you’re a much nicer human being than {insert name of other agent here}. He turned me down flat,” and go on to give details about how mean he was?

(e) launch into a ten-minute diatribe about the two years you’ve spent querying this particular project?

(f) thank her profusely and vanish in a puff of smoke, so you may pitch to another agent? And before you send out the requested pages IN THEIR ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and OUT LOUD?

If you said anything but (f), I can only advise you run, not walk, to read my Pitchingpalooza series — conveniently gathered for your perusing pleasure under the PITCHING heading on the archive list at right — and as well as the entirety of the INDUSTRY ETIQUETTE category. You need to learn what’s considered polite and reasonable in the industry, pronto.

It will also help you gain a more realistic sense of the immense importance agents and editors attach to their time. In a face-to-face pitch in a formal meeting, agents tend to be more selective than in a hallway pitch. The reason is, you guessed it, time: they’ve got more of it than in a hallway pitch. In a ten-minute meeting, there is actual leisure to consider what you are saying, to weigh the book’s merits.

In short, enough time to save themselves some down the line by rejecting your book now.

Why might this seem desirable to them? Well, think about it: if you send it to them at their request, someone in their office is ethically required to spend time reading it, right? By rejecting it on the pitch alone, they’ve just saved their Millicent 5 or 10 minutes.

In a perverse way, a formal pitch can be significantly harder to give successfully than a casual one. Sitting down in front of an agent or editor, looking her in the eye, and beginning to talk about your book can be quite a bit more intimidating than launching into a hallway pitch.

Think of it this way: every time you buttonhole an agent and say those words is one less query letter you’re going to need to send out.

Still breathing at least once an hour? Good; I’ll move on.

As a veteran of many, many writers’ conferences all over the country, I can tell you from experience that they can be very, very tiring. Especially if it’s your first conference. Just sitting under fluorescent lights in an air-conditioned room for that many hours would tend to leech the life force out of you all by itself, but here, you will be surrounded by a whole lot of very stressed people while you are trying to learn as much as you possibly can.

As you may have noticed, most of my advice on how to cope with all of this ambient stress gracefully is pretty much what your mother said to you before you went to your first party: be polite; be nice to yourself and others; watch your caffeine and alcohol intake, and make sure to drink enough water throughout the day. Eat occasionally.

And you’re not wearing that, are you?

Actually, on the only occasion when my mother actually made that comment upon something I was wearing, she had made the frock in question. For my senior prom, she cranked out a backless little number in midnight-blue Chinese silk that she liked to call my Carole Lombard dress for an occasion where practically every other girl was going to be wearing something demure and flouncy by Laura Ashley. It was, to put it mildly, not what anyone expected the valedictorian to wear.

She hastened to alter it. Even with the addition of quite a bit of additional fabric, most of the male teachers followed me around all night long. The last time I bumped into my old chorus teacher, he spontaneously recalled the dress. “A shame that you didn’t dress like that all the time,” he said wistfully.

Oh, what a great dress that was. Oh, how inappropriate it would have been for a writers’ conference — or really, for any occasion that did not involve going out for a big night on the town in 1939. But then, so would those prissy Laura Ashley frocks.

Which brings me back to my point (thank goodness).

I wrote on what you should and shouldn’t wear to a conference at some length in an earlier post, but if you find yourself in perplexity when you are standing in front of your closet, remember this solid rule that will help you wherever you go within the publishing industry: unless you will be attending a black-tie affair, you are almost always safe with what would be appropriate to wear to your first big public reading of your book.

And don’t those of you who have been hanging around the industry for a while wish someone had shared that little tidbit with you sooner?

To repeat a bit more motherly advice: do remember to eat something within an hour or two of your pitch meeting. I know that you may feel too nervous to feel hungry, but believe me, if you were going to pick an hour of your life for feeling light-headed, your first encounter with your future agent is not a wise choice. If you are giving a hallway pitch, or standing waiting to go into a meeting, make sure not to lock your knees, so you do not faint.

And practice, practice, practice before you go into your meetings. This is the single best thing you can do in advance to preserve yourself from being overwhelmed.

Fortunately, conferences are peculiarly rich in opportunities to practice talking about your book. As I pointed out last time, you will be surrounded by hundreds of other writers. Introduce yourself, and practice pitching to them. Better still, find people who share your interests and get to know them. Share a cookie; ask whether they know a good place to get lunch; talk about your work with someone who will understand.

Because, really, is your life, is any writer’s life, already filled with too many people who get what we do? You will be an infinitely happier camper in the long run if you have friends who can understand your successes and sympathize with your setbacks as only another writer can.

I was thinking about this the other day, when I snuck into the PNWA conference to videotape an interview with a recently-published author and longtime member of the Author! Author! community about his novel. Had the muses abruptly snatched me up, carried me through the air, and flung me down at any similar gathering in the world, I would have known within seconds that I was at a writers’ conference, and on the first day, too.

How did I know? Because the lobby, the bar, and the restaurant in the hotel where the conference was being held was filled with nervous-looking people sitting by themselves. Half of them were peering at pieces of paper, their mouths moving: clearly, they were practicing their pitches. While just a few feet away, a perfectly nice fellow writer was doing precisely the same thing.

As someone who has over the years met hundreds of fabulous people by the simple expedient of turning to the nearest pitch-practicer in a situation like this and saying, “So what do you write?”, I have to say, I find this dynamic sad. I hope that these isolated souls did eventually work up the nerve to say hello to one another, but astonishingly often, I see writers leaving conferences without seeming to say goodbye to anyone.

I cannot urge you strongly enough not to be one of those conference attendees. Make some friends. Because, honestly, a writer’s life cannot be too full of other writers.

Why not? Well, who else is going to be as thrilled to hear that you have landed an agent? Or sold a manuscript? Who else is going to rush out and buy your book the instant it appears in print, because it’s so empowering to see a fellow writer succeed?

Again, I speak from experience: the first people I told about my first book deal — after my SO and my mother, of course — were writers I had met at conferences. Why call them before, say, my college roommate? Because ordinary people, the kind who don’t spend their spare time creating new realities out of whole cloth, honestly, truly, sincerely, often have difficulty understanding the pressures and timelines that rule writers’ lives.

I was lucky: I already knew a lot of writers, including my college roommate — who recently sold her first novel to Algonquin, by the way. (Well done, Julie!) But the very first words my erstwhile SO’s mother uttered after hearing that my memoir had sold were, “What do you mean, it’s not coming out for another couple of years? Can’t you write any faster than that?”?

This kind of response is unfortunately common, and frankly, most people’s eyes glaze over about 42 seconds into an explanation of how a print queue works. I don’t think any writer ever gets used to seeing her non-writer friends’ faces fall upon being told that the book won’t be coming out for a year or two, at least, after the sale that’s just happened, or that upon learning that signing with an agent does not automatically equal a publication contract, or upon receiving the startling revelation that not every book is headed for the bestseller list.

Thought I got off track from the question of how to keep from getting stressed out, didn’t you? Actually, I didn’t: finding buddies to go through the conference process with you can help you feel grounded throughout both the conference and your writing life.

Not only are these new buddies great potential first readers for your manuscripts, future writing group members, and people to invite to book readings, they’re also folks to pass notes to during talks. (Minor disobedience is a terrific way to blow off steam, don’t you find?) You can hear about the high points of classes you don’t attend from them afterward.

And who wouldn’t rather walk into a room with 300 strangers and one keynote speaker with a newfound chum than alone?

Making friends within the hectic conference environment will help you retain a sense of being a valuable, interesting individual far better than keeping to yourself, and the long-term benefits are endless. To paraphrase Goethe, it is not the formal structures that make the world fell warm and friendly; friends make the earth feel like an inhabited garden.

So please, for your own sake: make some friends at the conference, so you will have someone to pick up the phone and call when the agent of your dreams falls in love with your first chapter and asks to see the entire book. And get to enjoy the vicarious thrill when your writing friends leap their hurdles, too.

Oh, you think it didn’t make my day when Julie’s book sold? It made my month. It showed that being serious, talented, and smart can indeed pay off in the long run.

Writing can be a very lonely business. Nothing brightens the long, slow slog like opening your e-mail when you’re really discouraged to find a message from a friend who’s just sold a book or landed an agent.

Well, okay, I’ll admit it: getting a call from your agent telling you that YOU have just sold a book is rather more of a day-brightener. As is the call saying, “I love your work, and I want to represent you.”

But the other is still awfully darned good. Start laying the groundwork for it now.

Something else that can help keep you from stressing out too much: while it’s always nice if you can be so comfortable with your pitch that you can give it from memory, it’s probably fair to assume that you’re going to be the teensiest bit nervous during your meetings. So do yourself a favor — write it all down; give yourself permission to read it when the time comes, if you feel that will help you.

Really, it’s considered perfectly acceptable, and it will keep you from forgetting key points. Please humor me by writing on the top of the paper, in great big letters: BREATHE!

I sense some of you shifting uncomfortably in your seats, stubbornly refusing to breathe. “But Anne,” you point out, “I keep seeing pitching advice online that says if I can’t recite my pitch from memory, I might as well not give it at all.”

Ah, I have seen that advice, too. Almost invariably, it’s talking about pitching a script, not a manuscript — snd a script pitch, my friends, is much, much shorter than the average book pitch. Isn’t it amazing how often terms cross industry lines, yet people assume that since the word is that same, it must mean the same thing in every context in which it is used?.

Besides, people who work with manuscripts for a living understand wanting to write things down. Don’t be ashamed to consult your notes if you get stuck; believe me, everyone involved will be much, much happier to see you read it than to sit there uncomfortably while you struggle to remember the next bullet point on your list.

Do remember to pat yourself on the back occasionally, by the way, for being brave enough to put your ego on the line for your work. As with querying and submitting, it requires genuine guts to submit your ideas to the pros; I don’t think writers get enough credit for that.

In that spirit, I’m going to confess: I have one other conference-going ritual, something I do just before I walk into any convention center, anywhere, anytime, either to teach or to pitch. It’s not as courteous or as public-spirited as the other techniques I have described, but I find it is terrific for the mental health. I go away by myself somewhere and play at top volume Joe Jackson’s song Hit Single and Jill Sobule’s (I Don’t Want to Get) Bitter. Here’s the first:

A charming story about dumbing down a song so it will stand a better chance of making it big on the pop charts, HIT SINGLE includes the perfect lyric to hum while walking into a pitch meeting:

And when I think of all the years of finding out What I already knew Now I spread myself around And you can have 3 minutes, too.

If that doesn’t summarize the difference between pitching your work verbally and being judged on the quality of the writing itself, I should like to know what does. (Sorry, Joe: I would have preferred to link above to your site, but your site mysteriously doesn’t include lyrics.) Here’s the second song:

For those of you reading this at work (hey, it happens) and thus not able to play the song, this ditty about complaining concludes with a pretty good mantra for any writing conference-goer:

So I’ll smile with the rest, wishing everyone the best. And know the one who made it made it because she was actually pretty good. ‘Cause I don’t want to get bitter. I don’t want to turn cruel. I don’t want to get old before I have to. I don’t want to get jaded. Petrified and weighted. I don’t want to get bitter like you.

I hum that one a lot during conferences, I’ll admit — and not because you can’t throw a piece of bread at a major writers’ conference without hitting someone just delighted to moan about how hard it is to get published these days. Cynicism often masquerades as knowledge. I tend to start humming when a bestselling author who landed his agent 25 years ago, when the task was significantly easier, but does not seem aware that ambient conditions for aspiring writers have changed radically. Or a more recent success whose agent is her cousin’s next-door neighbor’s husband tells a roomful of people who have been querying for the past five years that good writing will inevitably find a home.

Perhaps, but certainly not easily. The Agency Fairy just receives too many requests for help these days. Anyone who tells you that the only possible barrier to landing an agent is the quality of your writing simply isn’t familiar with the current reality of the representation market.

What you’re trying to do is not easy or fun, but you can do it. You are your book’s best advocate; act like it. And remember, all you’re trying to do is to get these nice people to take a look at your writing.

No more, no less. It’s a perfectly reasonable request for an aspiring writer to make to an agent, and you’re going to be terrific at making it. How do I know? Because you’ve been sensible and brave enough to face your fears and prepare like a professional.

Kudos to you for taking your writing that seriously. Beginning Monday, I shall be talking about how to go about doing something that will help that agent or editor that asked to see your manuscript take your writing seriously: presenting it professionally and packing it off sensibly.

Oh, you thought I had stopped harping on the whatever you do, don’t send requested materials right away. Far from it. But first, I shall be keeping my promise from earlier in the week: tomorrow, I have a treat in store for you.

That’s an actual stone in my yard, believe it or not, one that apparently went out of its way to anthropomorphize itself for my illustrative pleasure. If rocks can be that helpful and friendly, it gives me great hope for human beings.

Which is my subtle way of leading into asking: after these last few weeks of posts, have you started to have dreams about pitching? If they’re not nightmares, and you’re scheduled to pitch at a conference anytime soon, you’re either a paragon of mental health, a born salesperson, or simply haven’t been paying very close attention. Either that, or I’ve seriously underemphasized the potential pitfalls.

For this, our last Pitchingpalooza post, I’m going to assume that you either are waking up in the night screaming or that I haven’t yet explained the conference environment adequately. So fasten your seatbelts — I’m going to be taking you on a guided tour of false expectations, avoidable missteps, and just plain disasters.

Hey, forewarned is forearmed. Or at least less stupefied in the moment.

First-time pitchers often harbor fears of inadvertently making a poor impression upon an agent or editor in a social situation, thereby nullifying their chances of being able to wow ‘em with a pitch in a formal meeting. I wish I could say that this is an unfounded fear, but actually, it’s pretty reasonable: one doesn’t have to spend much time hanging around that bar that’s never more than 100 yards from any writers’ conference in North America to hear a few horror stories about jaw-droppingly rude writers.

And I don’t know about you, but one of my more dubious gifts as a human being is an uncanny ability to find the most institutionally powerful person in the room and catch him in a misstatement or crack a joke that skewers his ego, generally before I know who he is. (It’s one of the reasons I elected to leave academia, as a matter of fact, as several past presidents of the American Political Science Association know to their sorrow. Fortunately for me, the step from spotting the incorrectly-placed comma in a constitution that would result in half the population’s losing a right to editing manuscripts was a relatively small one.)

Hard to imagine how this particular trait would have provided my ancestors with enough of a survival advantage to justify its being passed down the evolutionary line, but I do seem to have been born with it. Many are the family stories about the toddler critiquing the pediatrician’s sartorial choices.

Honestly, does anybody look good in those tacky white polyester coats?

Before any of my fellow compulsive truth-tellers begin to panic, let me hasten to add that agents’ and editors’ anecdotes are almost invariably about genuinely outrageous approach attempts, not minor faux pas. And that’s not just because “You’re not going to believe this, but a pitcher just forgot to tell me whether is book is fiction or nonfiction” isn’t nearly as likely to garner sympathy from fellow bar denizens as “This insane writer just grabbed my arm as I was rushing into the bathroom and refused to stop talking for 20 minutes.”

For one thing, the former is too common a phenomenon to excite much of a response from other agents. Unfortunately, though, the latter happens often enough that some agents turn against hallway pitching for life. As, indeed, many a product of the post-conference rumor mill can attest.

However — and this is a big however — in my experience, the aspiring writers who sit around and fret about being the objects of such anecdotes are virtually never the folks who ought to be worrying about it. These are not the kind of gaffes that your garden-variety well-mannered person is likely to commit.

The result: polite people end up tiptoeing around conferences, terrified of doing the wrong thing, while the rude stomp around like Godzilla with P.M.S. And then, once an agent who has been smashed into by one Godzilla too many complains on a blog or in an interview about how impolite writers are, the naturally courteous cringe, while the rude remain unfazed. Thus are the polite rendered more and more fearful of running afoul of an unspoken rule or two.

Case in point: technologically-savvy reader wrote in last year to ask if it was considered appropriate to take notes on a laptop or Blackberry during conference seminars. It’s still not very common (surprising, given how computer-bound most of us are these days) but yes, it is acceptable, under two conditions.

First, if you do not sit in a very prominent space in the audience — and not solely because of the tap-tap-tap sound you’ll be making. Believe it or not, it’s actually rather demoralizing for a lecturer to look out at a sea of faces that are all staring at their laps.. Are these people bored out of their minds, the worried speaker wonders, or merely taking notes very intensely?

Don’t believe me? The next time you attend a lecture of any sort, keep your eyes on the teacher’s face, rather than on your notes, your Blackberry, or that Octavia Butler novel you’ve hidden in your lap because you can’t believe that your boss is making you sit through a talk on the importance of conserving paper clips for the third time this year.

I guarantee that within two minutes, the teacher will be addressing half of her comments directly to you; consistent, animated-faced attention is THAT unusual in a lecture environment. The bigger the class, the more quickly she will focus upon the one audience member who is visibly interested in what she is saying.

Heck, in the university where I used to teach, active listening was so rare that occasionally, one or another of my colleagues would get so carried away with appreciation that he would marry a particularly attentive student. One trembles to think what these men would have done had they been gripping enough lecturers to animate an entire room.

Back to the Blackberry issue. It’s also considered, well, considerate to ask the speaker before the class if it is all right to use any electronic device during the seminar, be it computer, iPhone, or tape recorder.

Why? Think about it: if your head happens to be apparently focused upon your screen, how is the speaker to know that you’re not just checking your e-mail? Also, in these decadent days, when the antics of unwary pets and clumsy humans often go viral, how may a speaker be sure that you are not recording him with an eye to posting his speech beneath unflattering lighting on YouTube?

Enough about the presenters’ problems; let’s move on to yours. Do be aware that attending a conference, particularly your first, can be a bit overwhelming. You’re going to want to pace yourself.

“But Anne!” conference brochure-clutching writers everywhere pipe up. “The schedule is jam-packed with offerings, many of which overlap temporally! I don’t want to miss a thing!”

Yes, it’s tempting to take every single class and listen to every speaker, but frankly, you’re going to be a better pitcher if you allow yourself to take occasional breaks. Cut yourself some slack; don’t book yourself for the entire time.

Why? Well, let me ask you this: would you rather be babbling incoherently during the last seminar of the weekend, or raising your hand to ask a coherent question?

Before you answer that, allow me to add: since most attendees’ brains are mush by the end of the conference, it’s generally easier to get close to an agent or editor who teaches a class on the final day. Fewer lines, less competition.

Do make a point of doing something other than lingering in the conference center for three or four days straight. Go walk around the block. Sit in the sun. Grab a cup of coffee with that fabulous literary fiction writer you just met. Hang out in the bar that’s never more than 100 yards from any writers’ conference; that tends to be where the already-agented and already-published hang out, anyway.

And don’t you dare feel guilty about doing any of these things. Skipping the occasional seminar does not constitute being lax about pursuing professional opportunities: it is smart strategy, to make sure you’re fresh for your pitches. If you can’t tear yourself away, take a few moments to close your eyes and take a few deep breaths, to reset your internal pace from PANIC! to I’m-Doing-Fine.

I know that I sound like an over-eager Lamaze coach on this point, but I can’t overemphasize the importance of reminding yourself to keep breathing throughout the conference. A particularly good time for a nice lung-filling is immediately after you sit down in front of an agent or editor.

Trust me: your brain could use the oxygen right around then. It will help you calm down so you can make your most effective pitch.

And at the risk of sounding like the proverbial broken record, please, please, PLEASE don’t expect a conference miracle. Writing almost never sells on pitches alone, no matter how many times you have heard that apocryphal story about THE HORSE WHISPERER. You are not going to really know what an agent thinks about your work until she has read some of it.

Translation: it’s almost unheard-of for an agent to sign up a client during a conference. (And no, I have no idea why so many conference-organizers blithely hand out feedback forms asking if you found an agent at the event. Even the most successful conference pitchers generally don’t receive an offer for weeks, if not months.)

Remember, your goal here is not to be discovered on the spot, but to get the industry pro in front of you to ask to read your writing. Period.

Yes, I know: I’ve said this before. Repeatedly, throughout this very series. And I’m going to keep saying it as long as there are aspiring writers out there who walk into pitch meetings expecting to hear the agent cry, “My God, that’s the best premise since OLIVER TWIST. Here’s a representation contract — and look, here’s my favorite editor now. Let’s see if he’s interested. I want this book sold by midnight!”

Then, of course, the editor falls equally in love with it, offers an advance large enough to cover New Hampshire in $20 bills, and the book is out by Christmas. As an Oprah’s Book Club selection, naturally, even though neither the Oprah show nor her book club exist anymore.

Long-time readers, chant along with me now: this is not how the publishing industry works. This is not how the publishing industry works. This is not how the publishing industry works…

Did I say that you could stop repeating it?

The key to being a happy conference-goer is not only to realize that the popular conception of how books move from manuscript to publication is dead wrong, but to believe it. Having to make a significant effort in order to get an agent to read your manuscript is normal.

Thus the appeal of conference pitching: done well, it will allow you to skip the querying stage and pass directly to the submission stage. So being asked to send pages is a terrific outcome for this situation, not a distant second place to an imaginary reality.

Admittedly, though, that is easy to forget in the throes of a pitch meeting. Almost as easy as forgetting that a request to submit is not a promise to represent or publish. Out comes the broken record again:

Whatever an agent or editor says to you in a conference situation is just a conversation at a conference, not the Sermon on the Mount or testimony in front of a Congressional committee. There is no such thing as an implied offer of representation or publication; there are only concrete offers and preliminary conversations. Everything is provisional until some paper has changed hands.

This is equally true, incidentally, whether your conference experience includes an agent who actually starts drooling visibly with greed while you were pitching or an editor in a terrible mood who raves for 15 minutes about how the public isn’t buying books anymore. Until you sign a mutually-binding contract, no promises — or condemnation, for that matter — should be inferred or believed absolutely.

Try to maintain perspective. If you can’t, stop and take a few deep breaths.

Admittedly, perspective is genuinely hard to achieve when a real, live agent says, “Sure, send me the first chapter,” especially if you’ve been shopping the book around for eons. But it is vital to keep in the back of your mind that eliciting this statement is not the end of your job as a marketer. Oh, look, here’s another golden oldie from the broken record collection:

Regardless of how much any given agent or editor says she loves your pitch, she’s not going to make an actual decision until she’s read at least part of it. And she’s not going to clear her schedule for the rest of the month to read it, either.

So even if you are over the moon about positive response from the agent of your dreams, please, I beg you, DO NOT STOP PITCHING IN THE HALLWAYS. Try to generate as many requests to see your work as you can.

Why, yes, you’re right: that is going to be a heck of a lot of work. What’s your point?

No matter who says yes to you first, you will be much, much happier two months from now if you have a longer requested submissions list. Ultimately, going to a conference to pitch only twice, when there are 20 agents in the building, is just not efficient.

Far too many aspiring writers will just give up after one successful pitch, assuming, often wrongly, that a friendly pitch meeting means a predisposition to like a submission or an implied promise to read it quickly. It doesn’t, and it isn’t. So it is VERY much in your interest to send out submissions to several agents at once, rather than one at a time.

I heard that gasp, but no, there is absolutely nothing unethical about this, unless (a) one of the agencies has a policy precluding multiple submissions (rare) or (b) you actively promised one agent an exclusive. (I would EMPHATICALLY discourage you from granting (b), by the way — and if you don’t know why, please see the EXCLUSIVES TO AGENTS category at right before you even CONSIDER pitching at a conference.)

Some of you look concerned, but trust me, this is what the agents will be expecting you to do. If an agent wants an exclusive peek, she will ask for one point-blank; again, there’s no such thing as a tacit request for a solo submission. By all means, tell each of the agents in the cover letter that others are looking at it, but don’t make the hugely pervasive mistake of granting an effective exclusive that the agent does not expect, simply because she was the one you liked best.

I see some of you blushing: you’ve made this mistake, haven’t you? And you ended up waiting six months to hear back — or did not hear back at all, right?

“Wow, Anne!” those of you who have lived through this highly unpleasant experience gasp. “What kind of a crystal ball are you wielding these days? That’s precisely what happened to me!”

No crystal ball needed on this one: it happens to pitchers all the time. They misunderstand the level of connection they made with agents at conferences, committing themselves in principle before the agents in question have even seen their work. “Well, we just clicked,” these writers say.

What they tend not to say is that let’s face it, it’s a heck of a lot less work — not to mention less wearing on the nerves — to send out one submission than, say, seven or eight. It’s also less work not to keep querying while that nice agent from the conference considers your submission.

And then one sad day, months after the conference, they receive the rejection, often as a form letter. “What happened?” one-at-a-timers cry. “I thought we clicked. And now I feel like it’s too late to send out those other requested materials.”

Actually, if less than a year has passed since the conference, it isn’t. But just think how much happier a writer who could say, “Well, I’m sad that the agent I liked best decided against representing my book, but at least those six other agents are still considering it,” would be in that moment. Or even one in a position to sigh with relief and murmur, “Wow, am I ever glad that I kept querying throughout these last six months. Now, I have other requests for materials.”

Besides, your time is valuable: sending out those post-conference submissions one at a time, waiting for a response from each before moving on to the next, could eat up years. Just mention in your cover letter to each that other agents are also reading it, and keep moving forward.

Trust me, hearing that it’s a multiple submission not going to annoy anyone. That old saw about agents’ getting insulted if you don’t submit one at a time is absolutely untrue. Let’s toss another broken record onto the turntable:

Unless an agent asks for an exclusive look at your work, it’s neither expected nor in your interest to act as if s/he has. In fact, hearing that others are interested may even make your book seem more attractive.

Yet another reason you should keep on pitching in those hallways: it tends to be a trifle easier to get to yes than in a formal pitch. Counter-intuitive, isn’t it? Yet in many ways, casual pitches are more persuasive.

Why? For one simple reason: time. In a hallway pitch, agents will often automatically tell a writer to submit the first chapter, simply in order to be able to keep on walking down the hall, finish loading salad onto their plates, or be able to move on to the next person in line after the agents’ forum.

Seriously, it’s true. If the agent handles your type of work, the premise is interesting, and you are polite, they will usually hand you their business cards and say, “Send me the first 50 pages.”

Okay, pop quiz to see who has been paying attention to this series so far: after the agent says this, do you:

(a) regard it as an invitation to talk about your work at greater length?

(b) regard it as an invitation to a lifetime of friendship?

(c) regard it as a promise to make you the next bestselling author?

(d) say, “Gee, you’re a much nicer human being than {insert name of other agent here}. He turned me down flat,” and go on to give details about how mean he was?

(e) launch into a ten-minute diatribe about the two years you’ve spent querying this particular project?

(f) thank her profusely and vanish in a puff of smoke, so you may pitch to another agent? And before you send out the requested pages IN THEIR ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and OUT LOUD?

If you said anything but (Ff, I can only advise you go back and reread the Pitchingpalooza series — and as well as the entirety of the INDUSTRY ETIQUETTE category at right as well. You need to learn what’s considered polite and reasonable in the industry, pronto.

In a face-to-face pitch in a formal meeting, agents tend to be more selective than in a hallway pitch. Again, the reason is time: they’ve got more of it. In a ten-minute meeting, there is actual leisure to consider what you are saying, to weigh the book’s merits.

In short, enough time to save themselves some down the line by rejecting your book now.

Why might this seem desirable to them? Well, think about it: if you send it to them at their request, someone in their office is ethically required to spend time reading it, right? By rejecting it on the pitch alone, they’ve just saved Millicent the screener 5 or 10 minutes.

In a perverse way, a formal pitch can be significantly harder to give successfully than a hallway one. Sitting down in front of an agent or editor, looking her in the eye, and beginning to talk about your book can be quite a bit more intimidating than giving a hallway pitch.

Think of it this way: every time you buttonhole an agent and say those magic first hundred words is one less query letter you’re going to need to send out.

Still breathing at least once an hour? Good; I’ll move on.

As a veteran of many, many writers’ conferences all over the country, I can tell you from experience that they can be very, very tiring. Especially if it’s your first conference. Just sitting under fluorescent lights in an air-conditioned room for that many hours would tend to leech the life force out of you all by itself, but here, you will be surrounded by a whole lot of very stressed people while you are trying to learn as much as you possibly can.

As you may have noticed, most of my advice on how to cope with all of this ambient stress gracefully is pretty much what your mother said to you before you went to your first party: be polite; be nice to yourself and others; watch your caffeine and alcohol intake, and make sure to drink enough water throughout the day. Eat occasionally.

And you’re not wearing THAT, are you?

Actually, on the only occasion when my mother actually made that comment upon something I was wearing, she had made the frock in question. For my senior prom, she cranked out a backless little number in midnight-blue Chinese silk that she liked to call my “Carole Lombard dress,” for an occasion where practically every other girl was going to be wearing something demure and flouncy by Laura Ashley. It was, to put it mildly, not what anyone expected the valedictorian to wear.

She hastened to alter it. Even with the addition of quite a bit of additional fabric, most of the male teachers followed me around all night long. The last time I bumped into my old chorus teacher, he spontaneously recalled the dress. “A shame that you didn’t dress like that all the time,” he said wistfully.

Oh, what a great dress that was. Oh, how inappropriate it would have been for a writers’ conference — or really, for any occasion that did not involve going out for a big night on the town in 1939. But then, so would those prissy Laura Ashley frocks.

Which brings me back to my point (thank goodness).

I wrote on what you should and shouldn’t wear to a conference at some length in an earlier post, but if you find yourself in perplexity when you are standing in front of your closet, remember this solid rule that will help you wherever you go within the publishing industry: unless you will be attending a black-tie affair, you are almost always safe with what would be appropriate to wear to your first big public reading of your book.

And don’t those of you who have been hanging around the industry for a while wish someone had shared THAT little tidbit with you sooner?

To repeat a bit more motherly advice: do remember to eat something within an hour or two of your pitch meeting. I know that you may feel too nervous to be hungry but believe me, if you were going to pick an hour of your life for feeling light-headed, your first encounter with your future agent is not a wise choice. If you are giving a hallway pitch, or standing waiting to go into a meeting, make sure not to lock your knees, so you do not faint.

And practice, practice, practice before you go into your meetings. This is the single best thing you can do in advance to preserve yourself from being overwhelmed.

Fortunately, conferences are peculiarly rich in opportunities to practice talking about your book. As I pointed out yesterday, you will be surrounded by hundreds of other writers. Introduce yourself, and practice pitching to them. Better still, find people who share your interests and get to know them. Share a cookie; talk about your work with someone who will understand.

Because, really, is your life, is any writer’s life, already filled with too many people who get what we do? You will be an infinitely happier camper in the long run if you have friends who can understand your successes and sympathize with your setbacks as only another writer can.

I know this from experience, naturally. The first thing I said to many of my dearest friends in the world was, “So what do you write?”

To which the savvy conference-goer replies — chant it with me now, everyone — the magic first hundred words.

In fact, the first people I told about my first book deal — after my SO and my mother, of course — were people I had met in precisely this manner. Why call them before, say, my college roommate? Because ordinary people, the kind who don’t spend all of their spare time creating new realities out of whole cloth, honestly, truly, sincerely, often have difficulty understanding the pressures and timelines that rule writers’ lives.

I was lucky: I already knew a lot of writers, including my college roommate, who recently sold her first novel to Algonquin. (Well done, Julie!) But the very first words my erstwhile SO’s mother uttered after hearing that my memoir had sold were, “What do you mean, it’s not coming out for another couple of years? Can’t you write any faster than that?”

This kind of response is, unfortunately, common, and frankly, most people’s eyes glaze over about 42 seconds into an explanation of how a print queue works. I don’t think any writer ever gets used to seeing her non-writer friends’ faces fall upon being told that the book won’t be coming out for a year or two, at least, after the sale that’s just happened, or that signing with an agent does not automatically equal a publication contract, or that not every book is headed for the bestseller list.

Thought I got off track from the question of how to keep from getting stressed out, didn’t you? Actually, I didn’t: finding buddies to go through the conference process with you can help you feel grounded throughout both the weekend and your writing life.

Not only are these new buddies great potential first readers for your manuscripts, future writing group members, and people to invite to book readings, they’re also folks to pass notes to during talks. (Minor disobedience is a terrific way to blow off steam, I find.) You can hear about the high points of classes you don’t attend from them afterward.

And who wouldn’t rather walk into a room with 300 strangers and one keynote speaker with a newfound chum than alone?

Making friends within the hectic conference environment will help you retain a sense of being a valuable, interesting individual far better than keeping to yourself, and the long-term benefits are endless. To paraphrase Goethe, it is not the formal structures that make the world fell warm and friendly; friends make the earth feel like an inhabited garden.

So please, for your own sake: make some friends at the conference, so you will have someone to pick up the phone and call when the agent of your dreams falls in love with your first chapter and asks to see the entire book. And get to enjoy the vicarious thrill when your writing friends leap their hurdles, too.

You think it didn’t make my day when Julie’s book sold? It made my month. It showed that being serious, talented, and smart can indeed pay off in the long run.

This can be a very lonely business. Nothing brightens the long, slow slog like opening your e-mail when you’re really discouraged to find a message from a friend who’s just sold a book or landed an agent.

Well, okay, I’ll admit it: getting a call from your agent telling you that YOU have just sold a book is rather more of a day-brightener. As is the call saying, “I love your work, and I want to represent you.”

But the other is still awfully darned good. Start laying the groundwork for it now.

One more little thing that will help keep you from stressing out too much: while it’s always nice if you can be so comfortable with your pitch that you can give it from memory, it’s probably fair to assume that you’re going to be a LITTLE bit nervous during your meetings. So do yourself a favor — write it all down; give yourself permission to read it when the time comes, if you feel that will help you.

Really, it’s considered perfectly acceptable, and it will keep you from forgetting key points. Please humor me by writing on the top of the paper, in great big letters: BREATHE!

Do remember to pat yourself on the back occasionally, too, for being brave enough to put your ego on the line for your work. As with querying and submitting, it requires genuine guts to submit your ideas to the pros; I don’t think writers get enough credit for that.

In that spirit, I’m going to confess: I have one other conference-going ritual, something I do just before I walk into any convention center, anywhere, anytime, either to teach or to pitch. It’s not as courteous or as public-spirited as the other techniques I have described, but I find it is terrific for the mental health. I go away by myself somewhere and play at top volume Joe Jackson’s song Hit Single and Jill Sobule’s (I Don’t Want to Get) Bitter.

The former, a charming story about dumbing down a song so it will stand a better chance of making it big on the pop charts, includes the perfect lyric to hum while walking into a pitch meeting:

And when I think of all the years of finding out What I already knew Now I spread myself around And you can have 3 minutes, too.

If that doesn’t summarize the difference between pitching your work verbally and being judged on the quality of the writing itself, I should like to know what does. (Sorry, Joe: I would have preferred to link above to your site, but your site mysteriously doesn’t include lyrics.)

The latter, a song about complaining, concludes with a pretty good mantra for any conference-goer:

So I’ll smile with the rest, wishing everyone the best. And know the one who made it made it because she was actually pretty good. ‘Cause I don’t want to get bitter. I don’t want to turn cruel. I don’t want to get old before I have to. I don’t want to get jaded. Petrified and weighted. I don’t want to get bitter like you.

I hum that one a lot during conferences, I’ll admit — and not because you can’t throw a piece of bread at a major writers’ conference without hitting someone just delighted to moan about how hard it is to get published these days. Cynicism often masquerades as knowledge. I tend to start humming when a bestselling author who landed his agent 25 years ago, when the task was significantly easier, or a more recent success whose agent is her cousin’s next-door neighbor’s husband tells a roomful of people who have been querying for the past five years that good writing will inevitably find a home.

Perhaps, but certainly not easily. The Agency Fairy just receives too many requests for help these days. Anyone who tells you that the only possible barrier to landing an agent is the quality of your writing simply isn’t familiar with the current reality of the representation market.

What you’re trying to do is not easy or fun, but you can do it. You are your book’s best advocate; act like it. And remember, all you’re trying to do is to get these nice people to take a look at your writing.

No more, no less. It’s a perfectly reasonable request for an aspiring writer to make to an agent, and you’re going to be terrific at making it. How do I know? Because you’ve been sensible and brave enough to face your fears and prepare like a professional.

Kudos to you for taking your writing that seriously. Keep breathing, everyone, and keep up the good work!

A couple of years ago, in the midst of the test of human endurance and sheer grit known as the Seattle Ring Cycle — four Wagner operas over the course of five days, presented by the same group of singers — I saw something I had never seen before: the orchestra leaving its pit during the curtain call, at precisely the moment when the singer playing the lead in Die Walküre was walking forward for her solo curtain call. (And no, that’s not a picture of Brünnhilde; it’s Frank Gorshin as the Riddler on the old Batman show, a national treasure.)

Why would this very respectable and accomplished group of people have done such a rude and unprofessional thing? Were they simply exhausted, as the audience was, by so many consecutive hours of sitting? Did the golden hour of overtime click in thirty seconds hence? Had a swarm of hornets abruptly descended upon the string section?

All valid possibilities, I suppose, but my guess would be that they staged a walk-out for the same reason the audience members in my part of the balcony stopped yelling “Bravo,” sat down, and engaged in barely-audible golf claps when Brünnhilde tripped lightly to the front of the stage. They felt disappointed.

It wasn’t because the singer didn’t have a marvelous voice; far from it, as she demonstrated in Act III. Nor was the problem her acting: the lady was — and is — world-famous for playing this role. Unfortunately, in anticipation of Act III, she had chosen not to sing at full voice in Act II. As a result, the Valkyrie most closely associated with belting out the top notes was barely audible past the tenth row for a good hour.

An hour, alas, that contained the single best-known aria in Western opera, a little ditty that runs something like this:

To an audience committed enough to risk permanent nerve damage to its collective derrière in order to hear the famed lady with the horns on her head call her similarly-hatted sisters home, this was, at best, perplexing. Did Brünnhilde have a sore throat? Had she lost her nerve? Did her command of German fail her? Or did she merely figure that this was Seattle, not New York or Berlin, so she could afford to phone in half of her performance?

Performance anxiety or medical excuse, linguistic difficulties or apathy — we in the audience will never know. The only basis we had for judging her was how she had sung that night.

Just as, say, an agent or editor hearing a pitch can only respond to what actually tumbles out of the writer’s mouth during the meeting. It doesn’t matter how brilliantly the writer may have described his book out in the hallway 15 minutes ago, or how trenchant and gripping the pitch is on paper, or even how beautifully-written the manuscript may be. If the pitcher is inaudible due to nerves, loses his place in the middle of his tale, or falls prey to any of the million other perfectly understandable contretemps that routinely befall writers approaching agents and editors at literary conferences, the pitch’s chances of success are inevitably going to suffer.

Had I mentioned that it would behoove you to practice?

Performance anxiety is much on my mind today, campers, because I’m going to be concentrating in this post upon the delicate art of working up nerve to approach agents to pitch. Rather than focusing primarily upon what could go wrong — that way lies madness — I would encourage you to try to think of the pitching process as your interviewing agents as much as their interviewing you.

Okay, perhaps not quite as much, given just how competitive the agent-finding market is these days, but certainly, it’s not a meeting to approach uncritically. As, alas, the vast majority of pitchers (and queriers, for that matter) seem to do.

Oh, I’m not saying that it isn’t understandable. In the soul-grinding crush of pitching and querying, signing with an agent can start to feel like the end goal, the point at which all of the hard work is going to cease, rather than a victory to be celebrated along the long, long road to publication. Yes, you do want an agent to fall in love with your writing — but never forget that the point of having an agent is to market your book.

Before an army of Valkyries shouts, “Well, duh!” at me at a volume certain divas would have done well to emulate, allow me to add a spin to that observation that may not have occurred to some pitchers. Since a pitch meeting is a professional encounter, not a social event, it is very much in your interests to consider whether the person in front of you is a good bet for helping you meet your ultimate goal of publication, rather than whether you happen to like this person.

Yes, even if you happen to feel an instant personal rapport with the interesting soul across the pitching table — perhaps especially so. You’d be stunned how often a successful pitcher’s assessment of a meeting that went like gangbusters is not, “Wow, that agent really seems like she would be good at marketing my book, ” but, “I really felt like we clicked.” However simpatico an agent and writer may be at first, a pitching situation is not primarily about making friends or interpersonal chemistry; it’s about both parties trying to figure out whether they would be a good fit to work together on an ongoing basis.

There’s more to an agent-writer relationship than friendship, you know. In fact, that’s often a relatively small element. Obviously, you’re going to want to be able to trust your agent, but whether the two of you hit it off during your ten-minute chat is far less important to how well you will work together than your ability to communicate — and, yes, the agent’s contacts with editors who happen to publish books in your category.

So the common writerly fantasy that a friendly pitch meeting automatically equals a long-term connection is not only seldom true in actual practice; it can lead aspiring writers do make foolish choices. “Oh, but I felt such a strong connection with Agent Z,” they will protest. “I couldn’t possibly submit those pages Agent Q requested until I hear back from Z.”

Sound familiar, conference-goers? No? How about this one: “Since I had such a great pitch session with Agent R, why should I bother to pitch to anyone else at this conference? He’s sure to sign me.”

Or the ever-popular: “Yeah, it’s been 10 months since I submitted those pages Agent B requested, but I’m not going to keep querying or contact the agency to see if they have lost my submission packet. She seemed to like me; I don’t want to mess up our relationship.”

News flash: you don’t have a relationship with Agent B, or a connection with Agent Z, or a commitment from Agent R. What you did have, pitchers, was a nice conversation at a conference. Period.

So all of the statements above reflect poor strategic choices, based upon a misunderstanding of the pitching relationship. Successful pitchers’ hopes often rise sky-high, leading them to confuse a request for pages for an implied commitment. It isn’t, and it shouldn’t be interpreted as such.

Far too few pitchers seem to understand that. Here’s a useful rule of thumb: until an actual offer is on the table, a good pitch meeting is just — wait for it — a nice conversation at a conference.

But even if a smilingly-presented request for materials did imply more (and it doesn’t), the mere fact of liking an agent personally is not the best determinant of whether this is the right person to represent your manuscript. Or even whether the two of you can work well together under stressful conditions.

Yes, I did repeat the phrase work together, now that you mention it, and with good reason. Believe me, the author’s work does not end when the ink dries on the agency contract: its nature merely changes. It’s rare that a manuscript or proposal does not go through at least some revisions after the agency contract is signed, generally at the new agent’s request. The agent will also be the person deciding which editors will be seeing your writing, how many will be seeing it at a time, and how many rejections add up to tabling the project.

They will, in short, have a heck of a lot of power over you and your manuscript. So before you think about committing your manuscript or proposal to anyone’s hands, you’re going to want to ask some questions about who these people are, what they typically represent, and how they like to work with writers.

Stop cringing — if you’re going to be a successful author, this is crucial information.

Why? Well, agenting styles vary wildly. Some are very hands-on, line-editing the work they represent, and some prefer to, as the saying goes, leave the writing to the writers. Some enjoy explaining the publishing process to their clients, and some are infuriated by it. Some want their authors to check in regularly, while others roll their eyes if a client has the temerity to inquire whether the manuscript the agent sent out six months ago has met with any results yet.

It’s really in the best interests of everyone concerned, therefore, that such preferences be aired up front. If it drives you nuts when people don’t return phone calls within a day, you’re going to be miserable if that agent with whom you clicked is a habitual message-ignorer, right? By the same token, if the agent is given to supplying his clients with tons of marginalia, he’s going to be unhappy if you’re the type of writer who regards even the slightest revision suggestion as an occasion to challenge the critiquer to a duel.

Wordplay at twenty paces. Have your second meet mine at dawn by the unabridged dictionary stand at the nearest public library.

I know: a pitch meeting is an intimidating situation, and you don’t want to offend anybody. But remember, these people come to a conference to discover writers like you. Don’t talk yourself out of approaching them — and don’t be intimidated out of finding out what you need to know. Yes, the deck is stacked, but that does not mean that it’s impossible to make it: writers find agents at conferences all the time.

Including, incidentally, yours truly. After asking simply mountains of very pointed questions. I was merely being honest about the kind of client I would be.

Fortunately, you need not wait until your pitching appointment or you have buttonholed an agent in the hallway to ask: most writers’ conferences feature panels where agents and editors talk about what kind of books they are seeking and how they like to work. Almost invariably, the moderator will ask for questions from the audience.

That prospect should make you start rubbing your hands in glee like the villain in a melodrama. Here’s a risk-free chance to ask many agents at once about what they like in a book — and in a client.

It’s a golden opportunity, yet much of the time, it is squandered by what I shall politely term apple-polishing, rather than hard-hitting inquiries. Let’s face it, “Isn’t it difficult to choose between so many marvelous submissions?” isn’t exactly cross-examination. Nor is it likely to elicit information that might enable a savvy pitcher to choose which agents to approach in the hallways and which to eschew.

Another common question-time misstep: the too-specific inquiry of the conference newbie who thinks being called upon by the moderator constitutes an invitation to make a mass pitch to everyone on the dais. “Would you be interested,” such a fellow will stand up and ask, “in a book about a starship captain who finds himself marooned on a deserted planet where only mistletoe grows, and his only chance of escape is to court the ancient Druidic gods?”

Now, personally, I would probably want to take a gander at that particular book, if only for giggles, but that’s not really the issue here. Universally, this kind of approach-disguised-as-question falls flat on its face.

Why? Manners, my dears, manners. This guy is trying to side-step the rules by which every other pitcher at the conference has tacitly agreed to abide; why should any of the agents on the panel reward that kind of behavior?

Let me reformulate that, as it may sound a bit strange coming from the patron saint of the hallway pitch: the agents’ and editors’ forums should not be construed as pitch sessions. You may, if you can work up the nerve, walk up to the panelists after this forum to try out your hallway pitch, but you will make a much, much better impression if you use the question time for — wait for it, Brünnhilde — questions.

Still not convinced? Okay, let’s take a gander at what happens when our misguided friend ignores this dictum — as, I assure you, someone invariably does at every major conference. If the agents are feeling kind that morning, one of them will try to turn this too-specific question into an issue of more general concern, as in, “It’s interesting that you ask that, because the SF market right now is very much geared toward (some other focus entirely that would preclude serious consideration of the pitch above)…”

The other, less charitable, and significantly more common response is for the agents all to say no and the moderator to ask for the next question from the audience. End of pitch attempt. Like hallway pitching, the response all depends upon the mood and generosity level of the agents approached — and how politely the writer has made the request.

Even if you are Emily Post personified, however, don’t bother with the broadcast pitch approach: it’s not worth the risk. In all probability, the only result will be your getting talked about negatively in the bar that’s never more than 100 yards from any writers’ conference in North America.

Trust me on this one. I’ve been there; I’ve heard the anecdotes.

A popular variation on this faux pas is a writer’s standing up, describing her book, and asking how much she could expect to receive as an advance. From the writer’s point of view, this certainly seems like a reasonable question, doesn’t it? Yet to industry-trained ears, it says very clearly that the asker has not gone to the trouble of learning much about how publishing actually works.

Why is that so evident to the pros? In the first place, advances vary wildly. Think about how deal memos are constructed: pretty much everything that has to do with the author’s cut is a matter of negotiation. (If you have no idea what a deal memo is, you might want to take a gander at the HOW DO MANUSCRIPTS GET PUBLISHED? category on the archive list at right. Even aspiring writers who have done their homework often harbor misconceptions about how the process works.) Second, the manuscript that attracts competitive bidding today may not interest any editor at all six months from now.

When an aspiring writer asks such a question, what an agent tends to hear is, “I want you to predict the market value of a book you know absolutely nothing about, which may or may not be any good, and I expect this advice to be applicable at any time I may try to market this book concept.” Again: not really how the writer should be presenting herself, strategically speaking.

So how does one use question time correctly, you ask? You’re going to want to keep your question general and, if at all possible, have everyone on the panel answer it, so you don’t appear to be targeting one of them for critique.

Oh, it happens. It’s pretty to see how quickly agents — who, after all, are in competition with one another just as much as writers are — will rush to defend one of their own.

Another common faux pas is to challenge what an agent on the panel has already said. Often, the writers who go this route will cite another source, for added credibility, “You said X ten minutes ago, but Miss Snark says…”

If you take nothing else I say into the Q&A session, remember this: this type of question will not help you win friends and influence people. Human nature, I’m afraid: ho one particularly likes to be contradicted in front of a roomful of people. Being told that someone out there is laying down rules of her conduct is far more likely to raise hackles than provide clarification.

And it’s not as though the average agent reads the many writing blogs out there, even if she happens to write one herself. So any name you cite — up to and including Miss S’, who even at the height of her blog’s popularity enjoyed at best a mixed reputation amongst agents — is unlikely to seem like an unimpeachable source.

Trust me: as an opening gambit, it just won’t work.

Although should you happen to bump into may agent at a conference, you may certainly feel free to preface your remarks to him with, “I really like Anne Mini’s blog,” should you be so moved. He gets a kick out of it. As long, that is, as you did not add immediately thereafter, “…and she says that what you told us a moment ago is wrong.”

So what should you ask that intimidating row of agents? Here are few suggestions that designed to elicit information you would probably have a hard time gleaning anywhere else. As a fringe benefit, these will generally provoke interesting comments, rather than the usual bleak diagnoses of how tough the market is right now:

“What was the last book each of you picked up at a conference? What made that book stand out from the others you heard pitched?” I love this question, as it gives pitchers hints about how the agents like to hear a book described; darned useful information.

“Who is your favorite client, and why?” Agents tend to love this question, as it enables them to promote a client’s work. Make a great show of writing down names, nodding vigorously to indicate that you either you are intending to rush to the nearest brick-and-mortar bookstore the instant the conference is over and buy all of that author’s books or already own that author’s entire literary output and believe that s/he is the best thing to happen to literature since Homer first got the idea of telling the story of the Trojan war.

Hey, agents make a living from their clients’ royalties. You think they don’t mention their clients at conferences in the hope of stimulating some book sales?

“How long do you stick with a book you really love that’s not selling before you give up on it?” In many ways, this is the single most important thing to know about an agent with whom you’re considering signing — and it’s an agent-friendly question, because they almost invariably answer it by talking about a pet project that was hard to place, but eventually did get published.

Word to the wise: while it’s tempting to be impressed by the story about how the agent showed a particular manuscript to 43 editors before it got picked up, it’s worth asking the follow-up question, “Is that your regular practice, or did you especially love that book?” It’s not unheard-of for an established agent to recycle a single heroic incident from the very beginning of his career throughout a couple of decades’ worth of writers’ conference panels. Bear in mind that what he was willing to do for the best manuscript he had ever read back in 1982 isn’t necessarily indicative of how he might handle your book now.

“If I were looking to understand what a great first novel (or first book in your chosen category) would read like from an agent’s point of view, what books recently out would you suggest I read?” Another question that tends to be popular with panelists — because, trust me, no agent on earth is going to name a book that s/he DIDN’T represent.

“How is selling a first-time author’s book different from selling the work of someone more established?” They’ll like this question less, but it will give you a pretty good idea of who has sold a debut novel lately and who hasn’t.

“When you consider a submission, are you looking for a career-long relationship with that writer, or are you only thinking about the book in front of you? If you thinking in the long term, how often do you expect your clients to produce new books?” This last varies a lot, but in the last couple of years, many fiction agents have specifically been on the look-out for career writers, rather than those with only one great book in them. Asking panelists this question will let you know to whom to mention the other three manuscripts you have sitting in a drawer.

“How much feedback do you give your clients before you submit their manuscripts? Do you usually ask for a revision before you send a book out? How much do you like to get involved in the revision process?” Yes, this is an enormous, multi-part question, but the agents who never edit at all will usually say so immediately.

Translation: they don’t like to take on unpolished manuscripts, even if they have great market potential. Wouldn’t you prefer to know that before you submit, rather than after?

“Is there any kind of book you specifically do NOT want to hear pitched this weekend?” Hey, someone’s got to pull the pin on that grenade. Sometimes they will answer this question unsolicited, however, so do keep an ear out during the forum.

What was the last book you picked up from a conference pitch and why? What made that pitch stand out to you? The benefits of this question are twofold: it will enable agents to gush about clients whose books have not yet been released (always fun for them), and you might just glean a pitching tip or two.

Do be aware, however, that some agents will respond defensively to this type of question, disliking the implication that they might EVER sign a writer without having read the manuscript in question. The usual deflecting response: “Well, I don’t really judge by the pitch; it all depends upon the writing.”

The other reason this question can be a bit risky is — you are sitting down, I hope? — there are some agents who habitually attend conferences, but rarely pick up new clients. Perhaps they just like talking to writers, or maybe they just want a tax-deductible excuse to get out of town for a long weekend. For this reason, pay attention to which agents on the panel don’t volunteer to answer this question; you might want to do a little checking about how many first books those agents have sold within the last couple of years.

“I’ve been hearing that many of the big agencies employ submission screeners. How many other people need to read a submission before it will reach your desk, and what kinds of comments do you like to see from them?” It can be difficult to get an answer to this question, but it can reveal quite a lot about the unwritten rules of screening.

“What’s the worst query letter you ever got, and why?” This is a great question to ask if you’re not planning to do any hallway pitching, but only intend to query the attending agents after the conference. (Beginning your query, naturally, with the magic words, I so enjoyed hearing you speak at the recent XYZ conference…)

The responses are usually pretty colorful. Take good notes; every other aspiring writer you know will probably want to see them.

Do you have any automatic red flags for submissions? Any pet peeves we all should avoid? This will feel daring as it exits your mouth, but you are well within your rights to ask this one — and everyone in the room will bless you for it. Every agent has a different representation style, and you want to know about any pet peeves or preferences before you stick your pages under their respective noses, right?

Fair warning about the response to this one: it’s very, very common for agents to imply that their individual pet peeves are shared by every other agent currently treading the earth’s crust. Sometimes it’s true; sometimes it isn’t.

However, should you ever hear an agent mention a personal pet peeve on a panel, scour your work for that problem before you send that agent anything. If an agent makes the effort to warn you, s/he means it.

What about the editors’ forum, you ask? After all that, you’ll be pleased to hear that there is really only one question that someone absolutely needs to ask the attending editors — although most of the questions above will work in this context, too. Since most publishing houses now have policies forbidding their editors from picking up unagented work, everyone in the room will be happier in the long run if you just pluck the pin from the grenade:

“If you found a fabulous book here at the conference, may I ask which of you could sign the author directly, and which of you would have to refer her to an agent?”

Yes, it’s a bit in-your-face, but the fact is, all of the major US publishing houses currently have policies forbidding editors from signing unrepresented writers — a policy of which editors tend to assume that pitchers are already aware. So much so that editors new to conferences are sometimes surprised that writers want to pitch to them. Often, senior editors are at the conference merely to give classes, network, or make connections with the already-established authors that often hang out at their local conferences; they may only have agreed to participate in pitch meetings to fill the time in between. (Hey, some conferences are boring.)

Asking to know whether you’ll be pitching to someone who could act directly or not can help you streamline your pitching attempts. Generally speaking, an editor from a small publishing house is more likely to be able to say yes to a manuscript, but if, for instance, an editor at HarperCollins is given to perusing its online competitive submission site, asking about direct submissions will probably elicit that information.

These questions will also help you decide to whom to pitch on a more professional basis than whether the agent or editor struck you as a nice person whilst speaking on the dais. This is not the best criterion to use, and certainly not the best ONLY criterion to use, because:

(a) Most people are rather different when speaking to large groups than one-on-one, which is how a signed writer would be dealing with an agent. Thus, your first impression from twenty feet away might not be an accurate predictor of what it would be like to work with them.

(b) Agent and editor fora tend to be rather early in the morning, and folks in the arts are often not morning people. (See conclusion on previous point).

(c) The pro who comes across as nastiest may in fact just be trying to save writers some chagrin. Telling the hard truth from a podium is not usually a big audience-pleaser, but the truth about the publishing industry is what you paid to come to the conference to hear, right?

(d) The pro who just oozes affection for writers and good writing may not have the best track record for picking up clients.

Finding out more about these people’s personal tastes and professional interests is also just good manners — and this is an industry where manners do count, to a surprisingly great extent. From a more self-interested perspective, wouldn’t you rather learn in an impersonal forum that Agent A isn’t remotely interested in your kind of book than during a face-to-face, one-on-one meeting?

Of course you would. See why I was so adamant about your picking a book category?

Once you have figured out which agents and editors from small houses (again, all of the major US publishers currently have policies against picking up unagented authors) represent books in your category and like your type of voice (not always the same thing, in practice), try to get appointments with ALL of them. Standing by the appointment desk and listening for cancellations is a good way to do this; so is talking to other prospective pitchers, to see if anyone is looking to switch or was so discouraged by what he heard coming from the dais that he’d changed his mind about pitching at all.

Fair warning: both practices can annoy the volunteers manning the appointment desk, so do make sure to request, not demand. Also, many conferences lay down rules barring signing up for extra appointments (unless you pay for them). However, even at such conferences, the eager beaver who happens to be standing by the desk when someone cancels can sometimes nab the extra slot.

A great, great time to take your stand: immediately after the agents’ forum. Would-be pitchers who have just heard their assigned agents declare from the dais that the appointment was a mismatch are often overjoyed to switch appointments with someone else, or even just cancel their own.

If you can’t get appointments, try to pitch to your likely candidates in the hallways. Again, immediately after the agents’ forum is an opportune moment for this.

I felt your chest seize up, but please, don’t be afraid: you’re there to learn how to market your work better, and they are there to pick up new writers. You are not a second-class citizen begging the nobility for a favor, as so many first-time pitchers seem to think. You are trying to find the best collaborators for your writing career.

As Francis I of France put it: “The sun shines for me as for others. I should very much like to see the clause in Adam’s will that excludes me from a share of the world.”

You deserve to be heard. Don’t let ‘em intimidate you.

But if you do find yourself too intimidated to walk up to someone in the industry and gasp out your magic first hundred words, do not despair: that information you gathered at the agents and editors’ forum will still serve you well. After the conference, you can query all of them — or at least the ones on your narrowed-down list.

And do you know what I would do in your quivered-in shoes? (Hint: I mentioned it above.)

If you said, “By Jove, you would go ahead and write the name of the conference on the outside of the envelope or put it in the subject line an e-mailed query,” give yourself a gold star for the day.

Why is this a dandy idea? Because in most agencies, conference-goers are regarded as a bit savvier than the average querier; their queries, therefore, tend to be taken a bit more seriously AND read with greater attention. So it’s well worth your while.

Oh, and before I forget: make sure to write REQUESTED MATERIALS in great big letters on the outside of the envelope or place it in the subject line of your e-mail, for the reasons above. (Assuming, of course, that an agent or editor did indeed request those materials. Don’t scrawl it otherwise.)

But whatever you do, don’t be a silent wallflower at a writers’ conference. Take a few polite risks, and don’t be afraid to approach editors from smaller presses. The Brünnhilde who perpetually saves her voice for the final act has a hard time making a good first impression.

Sing out, Hildy. This could be your big break.

Tomorrow, I’ll be sharing a few hints on maintaining your energy throughout what can be a pretty exhausting event — and then, I have a few treats in store for the long weekend. Keep up the good work!

Okay, so maybe a gin-and-tonic isn’t actually a necessity of conference life. However, if an alien descended from the planet Targ to make the rounds of a few dozen writers’ conferences, you could hardly blame him/her/it from reaching that conclusion.

I’m not saying that people drink a lot at writers’ conferences. I’m just saying that if Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Graham Greene stumbled into the bar that’s never more than a hundred yards from any writers’ conference in North America, they probably would not be drinking alone.

Because the hired hands — agents, editors, conference presenters, visiting authors, etc. — have been known to congregate in that bar, it’s typically a pretty good place for an aspiring writer to make some literary connections. Or at least to strike up the ilk of conversation that leads to being asked, “So what do you write?”

Word to the wise: you’re going to want to be able to answer this question in a lucid manner, even very late in the evening. If you want to keep in fine pitching fettle — and you do — watch what you’re drinking, and remember to eat something. If you feel the heavy weight of peer pressure (or just don’t want a drink), club soda and lime is cosmetically identical to the aforementioned gin concoction.

I just mention. It’s also pretty good for rehydration — and believe me, after spending a day in most conference centers, your body will probably need it.

Seem like a frivolous concern, compared to the weightier issues of pitching? Darned right. Since we’ve all been so very good for so very long, I have a fun-but-practical topic for today: what materials should you bring with you to a conference — and, more importantly, to your pitch sessions with agents and editors?

Other than strong nerves, an iron stomach, and a firm conviction that your book is the best literary achievement since MADAME BOVARY, of course.

At minimum, you’re going to want to bring a trusty, comfortable pen and a notebook with a backing hard enough to write upon, so you can take good notes during seminars, agents’ fora, and the like. If you want to make friends quickly, throw a few extra pens and paper into your bag, for handing around to total strangers less prepared than you.

Even if you have no interest in making friends and influencing anyone other than an agent or editor at a conference, consider being the friendly neighborhood pen supplier. They are inexpensive, easily portable, and a small price to pay for making the acquaintance of some kind souls who will buy your books someday.

Oh, you weren’t planning on jotting down all of your new writer friends’ contact information, so you could let them know when your first book is about to come out? Why ever not? Who is going to understand better what a triumph that is — or be more likely to understand that the best way to support a writer is to buy her books?

You should also tote along all of the paperwork the conference organizers sent you, including a copy of your conference registration, information about your scheduled agent and/or editor appointments, and tickets to any dinners, luncheons, etc. for which you may have paid extra. (As, alas, one almost invariably does now at literary conferences. I can remember when rubber chicken banquets were thrown in gratis, and folks, I’m not particularly long in the tooth.)

I’m sensing some shifting in chairs out there, amn’t I? “But Anne,” those of you new to writing great big checks to conference organizers protest, “why would I need to burden myself with all of that paperwork? I already signed up for those events, as well as my pitch appointments. Won’t the conference folks have all that on file?”

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble here, but not necessarily. Remember, most writers’ conferences are organized by hard-working, dedicated, and sometimes overwhelmed teams of volunteers, not crack teams of hyper-efficient event organizers assisted by an army of support staff with Krazy Glue on their fingertips. Details have been known to fall through the cracks occasionally.

So it’s not very prudent to assume that your paperwork has not been crack fodder — or even that the selfless volunteers working the registration tables will have access to their computers to double-check what you paid to attend or which agent you asked to see. Few literary conferences are held in the offices or homes of the organizers, after all, and while being able to get into the dinner where you paid $60 to hear the keynote speaker may be vitally important to you, the volunteers on site will probably neither have the time nor the inclination to run home to double-check a misprinted list of attendees.

If you registered electronically, make sure to bring a hard copy of the confirmation. And if everything goes perfectly when you check in, please remember to thank the volunteer who helped you.

As my grandmother used to say: manners cost nothing. And as I said only moments ago, who do you think is going to buy your book? You may well want to be a speaker at this conference someday; be charming.

While you’re printing things out, go ahead and produce a hard-copy confirmation of your hotel reservation as well, if you’re not attending a conference that permits you to sleep in your own bed at night. Again, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but it is not at all unheard-of for a hotel hosting a conference to over-book.

Starting to sound like you’ll be carrying a lot of stuff? You will — so it’s a good idea to bring a shoulder bag sturdy enough to hold all of the handouts you will accumulate and books you will buy at the conference. This is not an occasion for a flimsy purse. Think grad student backpack, not clutch bag.

Don’t underestimate how many books you may acquire. It’s rare that a literary conference doesn’t have a room — or at least a table — devoted to convincing you to buy the collected works of conference speakers, local writers, and the fine folks who organized the conference. Don’t expect to receive discounts on books sold at a conference, though: because the conference typically gets a cut of sales, offering a members’ discount seldom seems to occur to organizers.

On the bright side, it’s usually child’s play to get ‘em signed. Even if the author is not hovering hopefully behind a pile of his literary output, if he’s at the conference at all, he’s going to be more than happy to autograph it. This is usually the case, incidentally, even if the author in question is a household name. So if you are looking for an excuse to walk up to a world-famous author and burble how much you love her writing, look no farther than this bookstore. It’s rare to find an author so jaded that she will not be willing to take a few minutes to sign the book a fan was kind enough to purchase.

Don’t be shy about walking up to ‘em in hallways and after speeches to ask; this is basic care and feeding of one’s readership. And if you’re polite about it — introducing yourself by saying how much you loved the author’s latest work and/or speech last night, perhaps, or via the Magic First Hundred Words — who knows? You might just end up with a marvelous literary friend.

Which is one of the reasons you signed up to go to a conference in the first place, right?

Again, though, use discretion. No one likes to be accosted with a pen and a hardback in the bathroom, or while deep in conversation with a friend one has not seen for seven years. The words, “Excuse me,” are your friends here.

Be aware, too, that when major bookstore chains organize these rooms (and at large conferences, it’s often a chain like Barnes & Noble), they often take an additional payment off the top, so a self-published author may well make less per book in such a venue. And if an author with a traditional publisher has shown up with her own copies, purloined from the sometimes generous stash of promotional copies publishers often provide authors because the expected copies did not show up on time for the conference (yes, it happens), the sales may not count toward official sales totals.

This is not to say that you should hesitate to purchase a book from the writer with whom you’ve been chatting in the book room for the last half an hour. You should, if the book sounds interesting. However, you might want to ask the author if s/he would prefer for you to buy it elsewhere. An author with a strong preference will be only too glad to steer you in the right direction.

Don’t be surprised if the question results in a book’s being shoved under your nose the next moment, though. The author may well elect to carry around half a dozen copies in his shoulder bag, just in case an eager reader turns up when the bookstore is closed. You may also be treated to a long litany of complaints about how much lower the royalties are when books are sold someplace like Costco (much of that steep discount typically comes out of the author’s end), or how much more work book promotion is for the author now than ten years ago, but that’s precisely the kind of behind-the-scenes insight you came to the conference to glean, right?

Speaking of requests folks in the industry are thrilled to get, you can hardly ask an agent or editor a more flattering question than, “Are there any books for sale here that you worked upon? I’d like to read a couple, to get a sense of your taste/style/why on earth anyone would want to spend years on end editing books about flamingos.”

Hard for even the surliest curmudgeon scowling at early morning light not to be pleased by that question.

By the way, at a conference that offers an agents’ or editors’ panel (and most do), do not even consider missing it. Attendees are expected to listen to what the agents and editors are seeking at the moment and take note where it does not match what was said in the conference guide blurb or on the agents’ websites.

Oh, did I forget to tell you to sit down before I mentioned that?

Tastes change. So does the market. But blurbs tend to get reused from year to year. Even the standard agency guides, resources that actually are updated yearly, don’t always represent what any given member agent wants right this minute.

No comment — except to say that you will be a much, much happier camper if you keep an ear cocked during the agents’ and editors’ forum to double-check that the agent to whom you were planning to pitch a vampire romance isn’t going around saying, “I swear, if I see ONE more vampire romance, I shan’t be responsible for my actions.”

Because attendees are expected to memorize such preferences — and, if necessary, to switch pitching appointments accordingly — it’s a good idea to jot ‘em all down. Yes, even if an agent is declaring her undying love for semi-explicit love scenes in science fiction, and you happen to write futuristic Westerns. I guarantee you that at least one of those writers who showed up without pens or paper will be asking within the next few hours, “Wait — what did that SF agent say she was looking for in a manuscript?”

Help him out, if only for the karma. And who do you think is going to buy…oh, you know the tune by now.

In addition to noting all such preferences in my trusty notebook, I always like to carry a few sheets of blank printer paper in my bag, so I can draw a diagram of the agents’ forum, and another of the editors’. That way, I can remember who was who by who was sitting where. I also note a few physical characteristics for each, along with their expressed preferences in books.

Why should I care what they look like and where they were sitting? Well, these fora are typically scheduled at the very beginning of the first full day of the conference — a very, very long day. By the time people are wandering into their appointments at the end of the second day, dehydrated from convention hall air and overwhelmed with masses of professional information, they’re often too tired to recall which editor had struck them the day before as someone with whom to try to finagle a last-minute appointment.

Or to be sure that the redhead to whom they were just introduced in the bar was the agent with the romantic tastes in science fiction — or the one who said she was interested primarily in historical fiction about nuns. You wouldn’t want to mix them up after your third gin-and-tonic, would you?

Being able to whip out those diagrams for a surreptitious last-minute check can be very helpful. It’s likely to be even more helpful a month or two after the conference, to assist you in remembering which of the dozen agents who spoke struck you as worthwhile to query instead of pitching, and which left you with the impression that they eat books, if not aspiring writers, for breakfast, and consume illustrators for lunch with an amusing côte de Rhone.

On my diagrams, the author-consumers tend to be depicted with horns, pitchfork, and tail. But that’s just my little memory-jogging device.

I always, always, ALWAYS advise writers to bring a big bottle of water to a conference — even to ones where the organizers tend to be very good about keeping water available. A screw-top bottle in your bag can save both spillage and inconvenience to your neighbors.

How so? Well, when you’re wedged into the middle of a row of eager note-takers, it’s not always the easiest thing in the world to make your way to the table with the pitcher on it, nor to step over people’s legs with a full glass in your hand.

If I seem to be harping on the dehydration theme, there’s a good reason: every indoor conference I have ever attended has dried out my contact lenses unmercifully. Personally, I prefer to meet people when my lenses are not opaque with grime.

I’m wacky that way. I also prefer for my voice to be audible when I speak, rather than rasping.

If your eyes dry out easily, consider wearing your glasses instead. Men may not make passes at girls who wear ‘em, to paraphrase the late great Ms. Parker, but looking bookish is seldom a drawback at a writers’ conference.

Even if you have perfect vision, there’s a good reason to keep on sippin’. If you are even vaguely prone to nerves — and who isn’t, while preparing to pitch? — being dehydrated can add substantially to your sense of being slightly off-kilter. You want to be at your best. Lip balm can be helpful in this respect, too.

Conferences and hotels, like airports, see a lot of traffic, so the week leading up to the conference is most emphatically the time to skip the vitamins. I go one step further: at the conference, I dump packets of Emergen-C into my water bottle, to keep my immune system strong. I’ve also been known to hand out chewable Vitamin C tablets like candy and bars of chocolate like medicine to those waiting in hallways for their pitch appointments.

If this seems like frou-frou advice, buttonhole me at a conference sometime, and I’ll regale you with stories about nervous pitchers who have passed out in front of agents. To stave off feeling woozy during a pitch meeting, here are some tips:

* Take nice, deep breaths. Not just every so often, but on a regular basis. You might even consider taking it up habitually.

* Don’t lock your knees when you’re standing. People who do tend to fall over.

* If you need to sit down, say so right away, no matter who happens to be standing in front of you. Trust me, that editor from Random House doesn’t want to have to pick you up off the floor, no matter how much she liked your pitch..

* Don’t drink too much coffee, tea, or alcohol prior to your pitch meeting. (Even though everyone else will be doing so with enthusiasm.) You will want your perceptions sharp, not wired or dulled.

* Go outside the conference center every so often. A glimpse of blue sky can provide a lot of perspective.

* Make some friends. You’ll have more fun, and you can meet in the hallway later to swap notes about seminars happening simultaneously.

* If you’re feeling nervous or scared, talk about it with some nice person you met in the hallway, rather than keeping it bottled inside.

* Be willing to act as someone else’s sounding board. Do it for the karma. And who do you think is going to buy your books in years to come?

This is a time to be very good to yourself. A conference should not be an endurance test. If I had my way, the hallways at any pitching conference would be lined with massage chairs, to reduce people’s stress levels.

While I’m sounding like your mother, I shall add: don’t try to pitch on an empty stomach.

I’m very serious about this — no matter how nervous you are, try to eat something an hour or so before your pitch appointment. When I ran the Pitch Practicing Palace (a safe space for those new to the game to run their pitches by agented writers before trying them out on an agent or editor, to weed out potential problems), I used to keep a bowl of candy on hand, simply because so few pitchers had remembered to feed themselves.

Trust me, even if your stomach is flipping around like the Flying Wallendas on speed, you’ll feel better if you eat something. If you are anticipating doing a lot of hallway pitching, or dislike the type of rubber chicken and reheated pasta that tends to turn up on conference buffets, you might want to conceal a few munchies in your bag, to keep yourself fueled up. I like to toss a couple of oranges into my conference kit: in a room with stagnant air, the aroma produced in the peeling process can lift everyone’s spirits. Even people who hate oranges may ask for a section.

The generous person with the tin of Altoids also tends to be rather popular in the waiting area near the pitching appointments. Even if you don’t aspire to being the waiting room’s Easter Bunny, it’s not a bad idea to bring along some mints or ginger candy for your own use, just in case you start to feel queasy.

Since you will most likely be sitting on comfortless chairs for many, many hours over the course of the conference, you might want to bring a small pillow, either to sit upon or for back support. Those metal chairs can be brutal. I once attended a conference where instead of tote bags, the organizers distributed portable seat cushions emblazoned with the writers’ organization’s logo to attendees.

You should have heard the public rejoicing.

In the spirit of serious frivolity, I’m going to make another suggestion: carry something silly in your bag, a good-luck charm or something that will make you smile when your hand brushes against it. When you’re stressed, it can work wonders to have a concealed secret.

Honest, this works. I used to advise my university students to wear their strangest underwear on final exam day, for that reason — it allowed them to know something that no one else in the room knew. (It also resulted in several years’ worth of students walking up to me when they turned in their bluebooks and telling me precisely what they were wearing under those athletic department sweats — and, on one memorable occasion, showing me. So I say from experience: resist the urge to share; it’s disconcerting to onlookers.)

If you suspect you would be uncomfortable wearing your 20-year-old Underroos or leather garter belt (sorry; you’re going to have to find your own link to that; I suspect it will not be difficult) under your conference attire, a teddy bear in your bag can serve much the same purpose. Anything will do, as long as it is special to you.

So far, my advice has been concerned with your comfort and welfare. From here on out, the rest of today’s tips will be all about networking.

That’s right, I said networking. Conferences are about CONFERRING, people.

Because you will, I hope, be meeting some God-awfully interesting at your next writers’ conference, you will want to bring some easily transferable pieces of paper with your contact information printed on it. A business card, for instance, or comparably sized sheets from your home printer.

I mention this now, so you may prepare in advance. Having to scrabble around in your tote bag for a stray scrap of paper upon which to inscribe your vitals every time you meet someone nice gets old fast.

Besides, if you file a Schedule C to claim your writing as a business, the cost of having the cards made is usually tax-deductible –- and in the US, you don’t necessarily have to make money as a writer in every year you file a Schedule C for it. I’m not a tax attorney, though, so talk to a tax advisor experienced in working with writers — not just artists. Heck, all of those books you buy might just be deductible as market research.

Seriously, it is worth your while to have some inexpensive business cards made, to print some up at home, or to ask Santa to bring you some professional-looking jobs for Christmas. It’s always a good idea to be able to hand your contact info to an agent or editor who expresses interest in your work. They don’t often ask for it, but if they do — in a situation, say, where an editor from a major press who is not allowed to pick up an unagented book really wants to hook you up with an agent — it’s best to be prepared. Even if the agent of your dreams just ends up using your card as a bookmark, she will see your name again.

Second, unless you make a point of sitting by yourself in a corner for the entire conference, you are probably going to meet other writers that you like. Maybe even some with whom you would like to exchange chapters, start a writers’ group, or just keep in contact to remind yourself that we’re all in this together. Or to add to that Notify When the Book Comes Out list I sincerely hope you have been maintaining for years. (How do you think all of those people who have said, “Gee, I’d like to read some of your work sometime,” will find out about your book if you do not tell them?)

It works the other way, too, of course. The easier you make it for those nice writers to contact you, the more likely they are to remain in contact. It’s just that simple.

I’m sensing some ambient rustling again. “But Anne,” some rustlers exclaim, “I’m going to the conference to meet folks in the industry who can help me get my work published. Why would I waste my time chatting up other aspiring writers, who are ostensibly there for precisely the same reason?”

A very good question, oh rustlers, and one that deserves a very direct answer: because it’s far from a waste of time.

Besides, avoiding the unpublished is just a wee bit snobbish, isn’t it? I would urge you to avoid the extremely common mistake of walking into any writers’ gathering thinking that the only people it is important for you to meet are the bigwigs: the agents, the editors, the keynote speakers. It requires less energy to keep to yourself, true, but it is a tad elitist, not to say short-sighted: in the long run, casting a wider acquaintance net will pay off better for you.

Why? For one very, very simple reason — and it’s not that these are the loyal friends who will not only buy your books, but sneak into bookstores across this fine land of ours and turn them cover-out, so browsers are more likely to notice them. The more writer friends you have, the easier it is to learn from experience.

Why make your own mistakes, when you can learn from your friends’, and they from yours? What better source for finding out which agents are really nice to writers, and which are not? And who do you think is going to come to your book signings five years from now, if not that sweet writer with whom you chatted about romantica at lunch?

Obviously, if you can swing a one-on-one with the keynote speaker, go for it. (An opening line that I’ve seldom seen fail: “Excuse me, but I wanted to thank you for that speech. You said exactly what I needed to hear right now.” Few public speakers, no matter how talented, are so secure that they won’t want to know what in particular struck you so.) But try not to let star-gazing distract you from interacting with the less well-known authors teaching the classes — who are there to help you, after all — or the writer sitting next to you in class. I have met some of the best writers I know by the simple dint of turning to the person rummaging through the packaged teas on the coffee table and saying, “So what do you write?”

Don’t tell me that you’re too shy to handle this situation — I happen to know that you have a secret weapon. Remember those magic first hundred words? This is the time to use ‘em.

Someday, some of your fellow conference attendees are going to be bigwigs themselves. Realistically, can you rule out the possibility that the person sitting next to you in the session on writer’s block isn’t the next Stephen King? Won’t you want to be able to say that you knew them when?

And even if this were not true (but it is), writing is an isolating business. For every hour that even the most commercially successful writer spends interacting with others in the business, she spends hundreds alone, typing away. The more friends you can make who will understand your emotional ups and downs as you work through scenes in a novel, or query agents, or gnaw your fingernails down to the knuckle, waiting for an editor to decide whether to buy your book, the better.

Even the world’s most charmed writer, blessed with immense talent AND vast quantities of pure, dumb luck, has days of wondering whether all the effort is worth it. Not all of us are lucky enough to live and work with people who appreciate the necessity of revising a sentence for the sixth time. Writers’ conferences are the ideal places to find friends to support you, the ones you call when your nearest and dearest think you are insane for sinking your heart and soul into a book that may not see print for a decade.

So stuff some business cards into your conference bag. While you’re at it, toss in a folder containing several copies of your synopsis and the first five pages of your book, as a writing sample.

Why five pages, specifically? Well, not all agents will want to see them, but many, when they are seriously taken with a pitch, will ask to see a few pages on the spot, to see if the writing is good enough to justify the serious time commitment of reading the whole book. It’s the same basic principle governing agency submission guidelines that request a few pages to be tucked into the query packet.

Having these pages ready to whip out at a moment’s notice will make you look substantially more professional than if you blush and murmur something about printing it out, or simply hand the agent your entire manuscript. Especially if you had the foresight to carry them in a folder, so they would not wrinkle, and to print them on 20-lb or better bright white paper.

Don’t, however, bother to bring your entire manuscript with you to the conference, unless you are a finalist in one of the major categories of the conference’s literary contest. You will never miss an opportunity by offering to mail or e-mail it instead. In fact, agents almost universally prefer it. This is often true, bizarrely, even if they insist that they want to read it on the airplane home.

Why the exception for the contest finalists? Well, I don’t think it should come as much of a surprise to anyone that agents tend to be pretty competitive people. The primary reason that an agent asks for the whole thing right away, in my experience, is if he is afraid that another agent at the conference will sign you before he’s had a chance to read it. The writers who tend to be the objects of such heart-rending scenes of jealousy are almost invariably those sporting blue ribbons.

So while I have known agents to read a chapter or two of a contest winner’s work in their hotel rooms, the chances of its happening in the normal run of a pitch day are roughly the same as finding the complete skeleton of a dinosaur in your back yard. It could happen — but it doesn’t really make sense to plan your life around a possibility that remote.

Don’t hurt your back lugging the manuscript box around; the sample will do just as well. And don’t bother to bring an electronic copy of your book — it’s actually considered rather rude to hand out CD-ROMs willy-nilly.

Why? Well, because not everyone is as polite as my lovely readers. It’s not at all uncommon for a total stranger to come charging up to an agent, editor, or someone like yours truly at a conference, shove a soft copy into our astonished hands, and disappear, calling back over her retreating shoulder, “My contact information’s on there, so you can let me know what you think of it.”

Without exception, electronic media presented in this manner ends up in the trash, unread.

Why? Well, apart from the general impoliteness involved in insisting that just because someone is in the industry, s/he has an obligation to read every stranger’s work, there’s also the very real risk that a stranger’s disk is going to be infected with a computer virus; it would be rather imprudent even to try to check out its contents.

Even if the recipient happened to have a really, really good firewall, this method also conveys a tacit expectation that the recipient is going to go to the trouble and expense of printing the book out — or risk considerable eyestrain by reading an entire book onscreen. Not very likely.

These days, if an agent or editor wants an electronic copy of your book, s/he will ask you to e-mail it. Trust me on this one.

Regardless, your 5-page sample should be in hard copy. Ideally, it should be the opening of the book, but if you feel that an excerpt from the end of the book showcases your work better, use that. Using the first five pages is widely considered more professional, though — it just exudes more confidence in your writing, as these are the first pages a screener would see in a submission.

From the writer’s perspective, the sole purpose of the writing sample is to get the agent to ask you to send the rest of the book, so although I hammer on this point about twice a month here, I’m going to say it again: as with everything else you submit to any industry pro, make sure that these pages are impeccably written, totally free of errors, and in standard format.

Seriously, this is not a moment when you want your pages to cry out, “The author’s unfamiliar with the norms of the industry!” You want the formatting to be unprovocative, showcasing rather than distracting from your writing.

If the fact that there is a standard format for manuscripts — and that it does not resemble the formatting of published books — is news to you, rush into the archives at right immediately, and take a gander at the HOW TO FORMAT A BOOK MANUSCRIPT category. Even if you’re relatively sure you’re doing it right, it isn’t a bad idea to double-check.

Stop groaning, long-time readers; we all could use a refresher from time to time. As long as I am writing this blog, no reader of mine is going to have his or her work rejected simply because no one told him or her what the rules of submission were.

Again, I’m funny that way.

Okay, that’s enough practicalities for one day. Avoid dehydration, make some friends, and, as always, keep up the good work!

Remember back at the beginning of this series, when I introduced you to the world’s worst salesman, that genial soul who evinced continual exasperation because consumers insisted upon wandering into his flooring emporium and demanding, well, flooring? If only all of the benighted souls pursuing Marmoleum and carpet would leave him alone for a while, perhaps he could get some real work done — like, say, selling some flooring.

I may have met his match over the weekend: a delightful gentleman whom Home Depot had, perhaps unwisely, entrusted with the task of translating the customer’s choice of paint chip into a bucket of something that might conceivably resemble that hue if applied judiciously to a wall. “Oh, I couldn’t possibly match that,” he told me in a tone that implied I was a mad scientist, bent upon world domination through vicious color manipulation. “I’d have to special-order the base for something like that. Might take weeks.”

The color in question was, should you care to know it, royal blue. The wall behind him was painted approximately the same color as my proffered paint chip. I could, had I been so inclined, simply reached onto the shelf immediately behind his head and grabbed a can of spray paint in the shade I was requesting.

Besides, he had said something quite similar to the beige-loving lady in front of me in line. I waved paint chips from three different manufacturers under his nose, suggesting that if he did not have the base for my first choice in stock, he might conceivably be able to try one of the others.

He snorted derisively. “Yeah, but I’d have to go into the back for either of those.” He was visibly surprised when this piece of sterling logic did not instantly dissuade me from wanting to paint anything, ever. He pointed out that he would actually have to walk all the way to the back of the store in order to fulfill my madcap request, but I remained adamant. “Maybe you could come back tomorrow,” he suggested.

Eventually, I cajoled him into attempting to mix some royal blue for my trim, just to see if it was possible. If it turned out not to be, I assured him, I would follow his advice and paint the room in question flat white. But at least the question of whether royal blue was a color extant only in theory would have been resolved for the ages.

Mirabile dictu, it is in fact feasible for a well-equipped hardware store to produce a can of non-white paint. Feeling that the paint gods were on my side, I recklessly requested a couple of gallons of light blue paint for the rest of the room.

He sighed so gustily that customers in adjacent aisles wheeled around to see who had been punched in the gut. “Lady, if you want colors like that, you should go to a specialty store. Now, if you could pick something more reasonable…”

“Well, I could gold-leaf the room, but that might be a trifle hard on the eyes.”

He appeared pleased with the suggestion. “That would be beautiful. Of course, we don’t carry anything like that here.”

Clearly, the man was a minion of the wallpaper industry. By dint of persistent cross-examination, however, I did manage to elicit an admission that a light blue could in fact be produced by — I hope I’m not giving away an artist’s secret here — mixing a blue tint with white paint. Who knew?

Not wanting to press my luck, I apprehended my paint cans and fled. I was halfway through turning the third wall light blue before I was forced to resort to the second gallon. The paint within appeared to be a brilliant orange.

“Well, that happens,” my hero informed me when I returned. “Some of these tints are unstable.”

Why am I sharing this story of woe and disillusionment toward the end of Pitchingpalooza, you ask? Because like this paint-monger, many a conference pitcher seems to believe, wrongly, that communicating his resentment about having to pitch at all will not fundamentally color his hearer’s perception of whether he knows what he is talking about. Judging by the tone and speed of many conference pitches, quite a few pitchers’ primary goal is just to get the agent or editor listening to it to decamp as swiftly as possible.

But we know better, right? Pop quiz: what’s the actual purpose of a conference pitch?

Help yourself to a gold star out of petty cash if you instantly shouted, “Why, to convince the agent or editor to ask to see pages!” But if your first instinct was to say, “Um, to survive my pitch meeting without dying of fright?” we need to talk.

Conference pitching was not invented by sadists in order to torture innocent writers, you know — in theory, it’s intended to save aspiring writers some time. Instead of having to proceed through a tedious and often protracted querying process that does not always result in requests for pages, a writer can approach several agents at a conference, present her book’s premise convincingly, and walk out with one or more materials requests.

But that doesn’t mean that the people hearing your pitch won’t notice if you appear to be hurried, hostile, or just plain petrified; how you present yourself and your book does matter. It’s okay to acknowledge that you’re nervous; it’s not okay to act as though the agent or editor harbors a grudge against writers in general and you in particular, simply because she asks what category would most comfortably fit your book.

Resentment of the process shows up beautifully within the context of a tense pitching appointment, and for good reason. Just as a query that begins Since agents like you have set yourself up as the gatekeepers of the publishing industry, I guess I have to go through you to get published is much less likely to succeed than on that introduces one’s book politely, a pitch accompanied by a bitter denunciation of the business that keeps the hearer shod, fed, and with a roof over her head is substantially less likely to engender a request to see pages than one that doesn’t.

Go figure. Remember, it’s human nature to prefer to work with upbeat, friendly people, rather than angry, sullen ones. A good agent will expect to have a lot of contact with his clients; you’re going to want to come across as easy to work with on a long-term basis.

You don’t have to smile constantly, naturally, or heap the agent with compliments on her attire. (“A blue suit — well, I can certainly see that you live in the fashion capital of North America.”) Just be pleasant, will ya?

I sense some disgruntlement out there. Go ahead, get it out — far better that you air it here than in a pitch meeting. “But Anne,” the annoyed many cry, “that’s not fair! I want my book to be judged on its writing and my great premise, not how likable I am.”

Seriously? If the agent of your dreams asks to see the first 50 pages of your manuscript, you’re going to quibble about why?

But okay, if you insist: logically, it is impossible for an agent or editor to assess anyone’s writing based upon a verbal pitch alone. The pro can glean quite a bit of information about whether he is likely to be a good fit for a particular book project from a pitch — the book’s category, for instance, or its target audience, the inherent excitement of its central conflict, whether the intended reader will sympathize with the protagonist’s dilemma — but if the only way that you will accept representation is if the agent reads your first two sentences and falls in love with your voice, pitching is not going to produce the outcome you want. Sorry to be the one to break it to you.

If, however, you are the kind of writer who approaches conference pitching as a means of leap-frogging over the query stage and straight to submission, it’s in your best interest to be as pleasant as possible. It will get your great premise a more hospitable hearing.

Is everyone clear on that? If not, please speak up; that’s what the comments section is for, people.

Remember, too, that in addition to maintaining a positive attitude, striving for clarity, rather than mere accuracy of description, will help you win friends for your book. Aspiring writers very, very frequently forget this, but the author is not the only one who is going to have to pitch any given book. Your agent will be pitching it to editors; the editor that picks it up will be pitching it to an editorial committee.

Indeed, it’s scarcely an exaggeration to say that one of the main points of conference pitching is to render pitching a book someone else’s responsibility. Making it pellucidly clear what your book is about will go a long way toward convincing an agent that it would be worth her time to take a gander at your pages.

Obviously, clarity of presentation is especially challenging for writers of multiple-protagonist novels. Earlier in this series, I went over a few reasons that it’s a better idea to pitch the overall story of a multiple-perspective book, rather than try to replicate the various protagonists’ personal story arcs or talk about voice choices. It tends to be substantially less confusing for the hearer this way, but there’s another very good reason not to overload the pitch with too much in-depth discussion of how the story is told, rather than what the story is.

So please, I implore you, do not open your pitch with, “My novel is a multi-perspective first-person narrative, alternating between the point of view of a color-blind house painter, a tone-deaf piano teacher, and a pianist who has entirely lost the sense of touch.” It’s not that these characters are uninteresting; your hearer will want to hear the story.

Don’t make that face at me, multiple perspective-lovers. Presumably, you chose the multiple POV narrative style because it fits the story you want to tell, not the other way around, right? That’s the writer’s job, figuring out the most effective means of telling the tale. That doesn’t change the fact that in order for an agent to sell the book to an editor, or the editor to take the book to committee, he’s going to have to be able to summarize the story.

That’s right — precisely the task all of you would-be pitchers out there have been resenting for a month now. And inveterate queriers have been resenting for years.

If the story comes across as too complex to be able to boil down into terms that the agent or editor will be able to use to convince others that this book is great, your pitch may raise some red flags. It really does behoove you, then, not to include every twist and turn of the storyline — or every point of view. If you get stuck about how to tell the overarching story of a book with multiple protagonists (or multiple storylines, for that matter), you could conceivably pick one or two of the protagonists and present his/her/their story/ies as the book, purely for pitching purposes.

Ooh, that suggestion generated some righteous indignation, didn’t it? “But Anne,” I hear some of you upright souls cry, “isn’t that misleading?”

Not really. Remember, the point of the pitch is not to distill the essence of the book: it is to convince the agent or editor to ask to read it.

No one on the other side of the pitching table seriously expects to learn everything about a book in a 2-minute speech, any more than he would from a synopsis. If it were possible, how much of a storyline could there possibly be? Why, in fact, would it take a whole book to tell it?

“But Anne,” the upright whimper, “I don’t want to lie. Won’t I get in trouble for implying that my book has only two protagonists when it in fact has twelve?”

Trust me, this strategy is not going to come back and bite you later, at least not enough to fret over. What makes me so sure of that? Frankly, it would require the memory banks of IBM’s Big Blue for a pitch-hearer to recall everything he heard over the average conference period.

Blame it on pitch fatigue. After an agent or editor has heard a hundred pitches at a conference this weekend, and two hundred the weekend after that, he’s not going to say when he receives your submission, “Hey! This has 4 more characters than the author told me it did!”

I know, I know: we all want to believe that our pitches are the exception to this — naturally, the agent of our dreams will remember every adjective choice and intake of breath from OUR pitches, as opposed to everyone else’s. But that, my dears, is writerly ego talking, the same ego that tries to insist that we must get our requested submissions out the door practically the instant the agent or editor’s request for them has entered our ears.

In practice, it just isn’t so.

And shouldn’t be, actually, in a business that rewards writing talent. Given the choice, it’s much, much better for you if the agent of your dreams remembers that the writing in your submission was brilliant than the details of what you said in your 10-minute meeting.

As to the question of being misleading…well, I’ll get back to the desirability of telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth a little later in this post. For now, let’s move on to the next reader’s question.

Insightful long-term reader Janet wrote in some time ago to ask how to handle the rather common dilemma of the writer whose local conference occurs whilst she’s in mid-revision: “What do you do when you realize that you might have to change the structure of the novel?” she asked. “Pitch the old way?”

I hear this question all the time during conference season, Janet. The answer really goes back to the pervasive writerly belief I touched upon briefly above, the notion that an agent or editor is going to remember any given pitch in enough detail down the road to catch discrepancies between the pitch and the book. But realistically, they’re going to be too tired to recall every detail by the time they get on the plane to return to New York, much less a month or two from now, when they get around to reading your submission.

Stop deflating, ego — this isn’t about you. It’s about them.

At a conference, the average agent or editor might be hearing as many as hundred pitches per day. Multiply that by the number of days of the conference — and multiply THAT by the number of conferences a particular agent or editor attends in a season, not to mention the queries and submissions she sees on a daily basis, and then you can begin to understand just how difficult it would be to retain them all.

I hate to bruise anyone’s feelings, but now that you’ve done the math, I ask you: how likely is it that she’s going to retain the specifics of, say, pitch #472?

You shouldn’t fret about that, because — pull out your hymnals, long-term readers — the purpose of a book pitch is to get the agent or editor to ask to read it, not to buy the book sight unseen. Since that request generally comes within a few minutes of the writer’s uttering the pitch, if it’s going to come at all, what you need to do is wow ‘em in the moment.

Although it is nice, admittedly, if yours is the pitch that causes an agent to scrawl in her notes, “Great imagery!”

That’s why, in case you’ve been wondering, I’ve been harping so much throughout Pitchingpalooza about the desirability of including memorable details in your pitch. You have the pitch-hearer’s attention for only a few moments, and 9 times out of 10, she’s going to be tired during those moments. A vividly-rendered sensual detail or surprising situation that she’s never heard before is your best bet to wake her up.

Under the circumstances, that’s not an insignificant achievement. Don’t lessen your triumph by insisting that she be able to reproduce your pitch from memory six weeks hence — or that you need to get those requested materials to her before she forgets who you are. Accept that she may not remember you by the time she gets on the plane to go home from the conference, and take the time to whip your manuscript into shape before submission.

The upside of short memory spans: you don’t really need to worry if your story changes between the time you pitch or query it and when you submit the manuscript pages. That’s par for the course. Writers rewrite and restructure their books all the time; it’s not considered particularly sinister.

That being said, your best bet in the case of a book in the throes of change is to tell the story that you feel is the most compelling. If you haven’t yet begun restructuring, it will probably be the old one, as it’s the one with which you are presumably most familiar, but if you can make a good yarn out of the changes you envision, it’s perfectly legitimate to pitch that instead.

It honestly is up to you. As long as the story is a grabber, that is.

While we’re on the subject, let’s talk about the ethics of not mentioning those aspects of the book one is afraid might negatively influence a pitch-hearer’s view of the manuscript. The most popular proposed omissions: the book’s length and whether it is actually finished on the day of the pitching appointment.

Let me take the second one first, as it’s easier to answer. There is a tacit expectation, occasionally seen in print in conference guides, that a writer will not market a novel until she has a complete draft in hand, because it would not be possible for an agent to market a partial first novel. In fact, most pitching and querying guides will tell you that you should NEVER pitch an unfinished work.

Except that it isn’t quite that simple. Agented writers pitch half-finished work to their agents all the time, for instance.

Does that mean that you should? Well, it depends. It would most definitely be frowned-upon to pitch a half-finished book that might take a year or two to polish off — unless, of course, the book in question is nonfiction, in which case you’d be marketing it as a book proposal, not as an entire manuscript, anyway.

Let me repeat that, because it’s important: nonfiction books are typically sold on proposals, not the entire manuscript. Yes, even if it’s a memoir; although some agents do prefer to see a full draft from a previously unpublished writer, the vast majority of memoirs are still sold in proposal form.

So I ask you: could you realistically have your novel in apple-pie order within the next six months?

If so, that’s not an unheard-of lapse before submitting requested materials. And if you have a chapter of your memoir in terrific shape, could you pull a book proposal together within that timeframe? (For some guidance on what that might entail, please see the aptly-named HOW TO WRITE A BOOK PROPOSAL category on the archive list at the bottom right-hand side of this page.)

If the answers to all of those questions are a resounding “No, by gum!” you should consider holding off. Unless, of course, you’d just like to get in some pitching practice while the stakes are still low. But if you are pitching a novel just to get the hang of it (a marvelous idea, by the way), don’t make the mistake of saying that the manuscript isn’t done yet.

It’s considered rude. You’re supposed to have a fiction project completed before you pitch or query it, you know.

Confused? You’re not alone. Like so many of the orders barked at conference attendees, the expectation of market-readiness has mutated a bit in translation and over time. Take, for instance, the prevailing wisdom that maintains you should have a full draft before you pitch because an agent or editor who is interested will ask you for the entire thing on the spot.

As in they will fly into an insensate fury if you’re not carrying it with you at the pitch meeting.

But as I have mentioned earlier in this series, demanding to see a full or even partial manuscript on the spot doesn’t happen all that often anymore (and the insensate fury part never happened in the first place). 99.9% of the time, even an agent who is extremely excited about a project will prefer that you mail it — or e-mail it.

Seriously, she’s not in that great a hurry — and trust me, she’s not going to clear his schedule in anticipation of receiving your submission. I’ll bring this up again when I go over how to prep a submission packet (probably in September; I want to go over query basics first, so PLEASE, if you have pitched within the last few weeks and are impatient to send things off, read through the HOW TO PUT TOGETHER A SUBMISSION PACKET category before you drop anything in the mail) but I always advise my clients and students not to overnight anything to an agency or publishing house unless the receiving party is paying the postage.

Yes, even if an agent or editor asks you to overnight it.

I heard that horrified gasp out there, but the fact is, it’s a myth that overnighted manuscripts get read faster — yes, even if the agent asked you to send it instantly. That request is extremely rare, however; most submitters simply assume that they should get it there right away — or that their work will be seem more professional if it shows up in an overnight package.

That might have been true 20 years ago, when overnighting a manuscript would have been a rarity but here’s a news flash: FedEx and other overnight packaging is just too common to attract any special notice in a crowded mailroom these days.

If you’re worried about speed, Priority Mail (which gets from one location to another within the US in 2-3 days) is far cheaper — and if you write REQUESTED MATERIALS in great big letters on the outside of the package, might actually get opened sooner than that spiffy-looking overnight mail packet.

Besides, even if you did go to the trouble and expense to get your manuscript onto the requester’s desk within hours of the request, it can often be months before an agent reads a manuscript, as those of you who have submitted before already know.

Which means, in practical terms, that you need not send it right away. And that, potentially, means that a savvy writer could buy a little time that could conceivably be used for revision. Or even writing.

Catching my drift here? After all, if you’re going to mail it anyway…and the agent is going to be on vacation until after Labor Day…and if you could really get away with sending requested materials anytime between now and Christmas…and if the agent has asked for only the first three chapters…

Or, to put it in querying terms: if the agencies are going to take a month to respond to the letter…and then ask for the first 50 pages…and that has to get by a couple of screeners before they can possibly ask for the rest?

Starting to get the picture?

There’s no reason not to work those predictable delays into your pitching and querying timeline. Naturally, I would never advise anyone to pitch a book that isn’t essentially done, but let’s face it, it may well be months before the person sitting across the table from you in a pitch meeting asks to see the entire manuscript.

And you know what? You’re under no obligation to send it out instantly, even then. If you can get requested materials out the door within a few months, you should be fine.

Although I would not encourage any of you to join the 40% of writers who are asked to submit requested materials but never do, anyone who has ever written a novel can tell you that where writing is concerned, there is finished — as in when you’ve made it all the way through the story and typed the words THE END on the last page — and then there is done — as in when you stop tinkering with it.

Then there’s REALLY done, the point at which you have revised it so often that you have calculated the exact trajectory of the pen you will need to lob toward Manhattan to knock your agent or editor in the head hard enough to get him to stop asking for additional changes.

And then there’s REALLY, REALLY done, when your editor has changed your title for the last time and has stopped lobbying for you to transform the liberal librarian sister into a neo-conservative professional squash player who wrote speeches for Ronald Reagan in his spare time.

But frankly, from the point of view of the industry, no manuscript is truly finished until it is sitting on a shelf in Barnes & Noble. Until the cover is actually attached to the book, it is an inherently malleable thing.

The fact that everyone concerned is aware of this, I think, renders a bit of sophistry on the writer’s part over the question of whether a manuscript is completed somewhat pardonable.

This does NOT mean, however, that it is in your best interests to waltz into a pitch meeting and announce that the book isn’t finished yet — in a word, don’t. Because agents and editors are, as a group, perfectly aware that writers are prone to levels of tinkering that would make Dante’s inferno appear uncomplex, it’s actually not a question that gets asked much.

If you are asked? Sophistry, my dears, sophistry, of the type that agented and published writers employ all the time: “I’m not quite happy with it yet, but I’m very close.”

You are close to finishing it, aren’t you? And you aren’t completely happy about every syllable of the current text, right?

The question of whether to mention manuscript length is a bit more tortured, as it tends to generate a stronger knee-jerk response in pitches and query letters than the question of submission timing. Or so I surmise, from the response to the inevitable moment at every writers’ conference I have ever attended when some stalwart soul stands up and asks how long a book is too long.

Without fail, half the room gasps at the response.

I hesitate to give limits, for fear of triggering precisely the type of literalist angst I deplored a couple of days ago, but here are a few ballpark estimates. Currently, first novels tend to run in the 65,000 – 100,000 word range — or, to put it another way, roughly 250 – 400 pages. (That’s estimated word count, by the way, 250 x # of pages in Times New Roman, standard format. For the hows and whys of estimation vs. actual word count, please see the WORD COUNT category at right.) Standards do vary a bit by genre, though — check the recent offerings in your area to get a general sense.

If your book runs much over 400 pages, be prepared for some unconscious flinching when you mention the length. Or just don’t mention the length in your pitch; it’s not a required element.

And remember, these are general guidelines, not absolute prohibitions. Few agency screeners will toss out a book if it contains a page 401. Do be aware, though, that after a book inches over the 125,000 word mark (500 pages, more or less), it does become substantially more expensive to bind and print. (For more on this point, please see the rather extensive exchange in the comment section of a past post.)

If at all possible, then, you will want to stay under that benchmark. If you have not, don’t mention the length in your pitch or query.

Not just for marketing reasons, or at any rate not merely to preclude the possibility of an instinctive response to a book’s length. If a manuscript is too long (or too short, but that is rarer since the advent of the computer), folks in the industry often have the same response as they do to a manuscript that’s not in standard format: they assume that the writer isn’t familiar with the prevailing norms.

And that, unfortunately, usually translates into the submission’s being taken less seriously — and often, the pitch or query as well.

If your book is over or under the expected estimated length for your genre, you will probably be happier if you do not volunteer length information in either your pitch or your query. This is not dishonest — neither a pitcher nor a querier is under any actual obligation to state the length of the manuscript up front.

I’m not recommending that you actually lie in response to a direct question, of course — but if the question is not asked, it will not behoove you to offer the information. Remember, part of the art of the pitch involves knowing when to shut your trap. You will not, after all, be hooked up to a lie detector throughout the course of your pitch.

Although that would be an interesting intimidation strategy, one I have not yet seen tried on the conference circuit. Given the current level of distrust aimed at memoirists these days, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it come into fashion.

Yes, I know: many experts will tell you that you MUST include word count in your query, but as far as I know, no major agency has a policy requiring Millicent to reject queries where it’s not mentioned. Some agents will say they like to see it, for the simple reason that it makes it easier to weed out the longest and the shortest manuscripts — but if your book would fall into either of those categories, is it really in your interest to promote a knee-jerk rejection?

My apologies for the unexpected mid-series hiatus; I honestly had not anticipated that Pitchingpalooza would carry us into September. (Especially as I have some genuinely juicy treats in store for you over Labor Day weekend.) Blame the muses’ notoriously perverse sense of humor for arranging to have two — count ‘em, two — of my editing clients’ acquiring editors announcing that they were moving on to pastures new last week. Everyone concerned wishes them happy trails, of course, but with a certain amount of trepidation: with any changing of the editorial guard inevitably comes changed expectations for the handed-over manuscript.

Okay, I’m not entirely clear on what that massive collective gasp of horror out there in the ether meant. Were some of you unaware that in recent years, it has become not at all uncommon for the acquiring editor not to remain with the publishing house long enough to see a book she just loved as a submission all the way through the publishing process? Or was the shock — and I suspect it was — that editors will often ask for major changes in manuscripts after they have acquired them, for both fiction and nonfiction?

Oh, I’m sorry; I should have warmed all of you memoirists out there before I sprung that last bit, especially those of you who have been slaving over the Annotated Table of Contents in your book proposals in anticipation of a post-Labor Day submission blitz. I know that you have been working hard, trying to cobble together a plausible and entertaining story arc in a series of chapter summaries — so it may well be dispiriting to hear that it’s far from rare for an acquiring editor, or even an agent offering representation to a nonfiction author, to tell the point-blank that some of those chapters will need to go. Or that others should be added.

Starting to make more sense now that nonfiction is typically sold on a book proposal, not a completed manuscript? While most of the book is theoretical, it’s easier to conceive of changing it.

Yes, even if the writer believes that it is already finished. No matter how complete a memoir or nonfiction book may be in the author’s mind, from a publishing perspective, everything is up for negotiation until it is actually in print and sitting on a bookstore shelf. What is and isn’t finished is the publisher’s call, not the author’s. That assumption pervades the submission stage, and even the pitching/querying stage of a proposal’s progress. From the acquiring editor’s point of view, the proposal is essentially a job application: the writer is making the case that she is the best person currently wandering this terrestrial sphere for the publishing house to hire to write that particular book.

See why I’ve spent this series urging all of you nonfiction writers to spend this series thinking about your platform, and figuring out ways to work it into your pitch?

I sensed all of you novelists relaxing over the course of the last couple of paragraphs, but perhaps you shouldn’t have: agents and editors ask fiction writers to change their manuscripts all the time, too, even absent an editorial changing of the guard. Little things, usually, like whether the ending of the book is dramatically satisfying or whether a complex literary voice constitutes overwriting or is just right.

And while we’re massaging the text, need the protagonist’s sister be gay? Or a deep-sea fisherperson with marked propensities toward disestablishmentarianism?

Oh, you may laugh, but with the high turnover at publishing houses these days, a savvy writer needs to be prepared to be flexible. Just don’t modify your only electronic copy of your original manuscript; it’s not beyond belief that the editor who takes over tomorrow from the person who took over yesterday will like the same things about your book that the acquiring editor did.

Are your heads spinning, campers? Good: you’re in a perfect mindset to think about conference pitching.

After the last couple of Pitchingpalooza posts we talked about how to pull everything we’ve learned throughout this series into a formal 2-minute pitch. Couldn’t you feel the excitement crackling in the air? The moment nearly brought a tear to the eye: the public rejoiced, the heavens opened, lions and lambs lay down together, and agents all over New York spontaneously flung their arms around the nearest aspiring writer, gurgling with joy.

What, you missed all that? Even the good folks cleaning up the ticker tape parade?

Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating a trifle. And maybe those of you who aren’t planning to attend a conference and pitch anytime soon didn’t find it all that goosebump-inducing. “Let’s get on with it, Anne,” some nonambulant writers scoffed. “Let’s get back to the type of stuff that writers do at home in the solitude of their lonely studios: writing, rewriting, querying, rewriting some more…”

Patience, scoffers: as I may have mentioned once or twice in the course of this admittedly rather extensive series, learning to pitch is going to make you a better querier. And perhaps even a better writer, at least as far as marketing is concerned.

Did I just hear the scoffers snort derisively again? Allow me to ask a clarifying question, smarty-pantses (astute slacksers?): hands up, every querying veteran out there who now wishes devoutly that s/he had known more about how the publishing industry thinks about books before querying for the first time.

That’s quite a response. Keep ‘em up if you sent out more than five queries before you figured out what your book’s selling points were.

Or — sacre bleu! – your book’s category.

That last one is so common that I decided to spare you the artistic representation, so there would still be room on the page for the rest of today’s post. The very idea of querying without knowing makes me cringe: how can you even guess which agents to query before you’ve come up with that?

Which is precisely why it’s a good idea for even writers who would never dream of pitching their books in person to learn how to do it. Not only are many of the same skills required to construct a winning pitch and a successful query letter, but many of the actual building blocks are the same.

Oh, you hadn’t noticed that?

Rest assured, it’s all been part of my evil plan. After Labor Day, we are going to delve once again into the wonderful world of querying. After a few well-deserved treats and perhaps a couple of short forays into craft, of course.

Why wait until after Labor Day, you ask? Long-time readers, chant it with me now: because a hefty hunk of the NYC-based publishing industry goes on vacation from the second week of August through Labor Day. And when they get back, guess what’s piled up high on their already-cluttered desks?

Uh-huh. Might as well hold off until they’ve had a chance to dig through those thousands of piled-up queries.

Trust me, you certainly have time to ponder the mysteries of pitching, glean a few insights, and think about your book’s selling points before our old pal, Millicent the agency screener, will wade her way through the backlog. Heck, you would also have time for a mastoid operation and a trip to the Bahamas; for a good week or two into September, Millie’s going to need be rejecting at a speeded-up clip, just to get through the backlog. Not to mention the thousands of queries that will dumped on her desk just after Labor Day, because so many aspiring writers had heard that they shouldn’t query in August.

I can already feel some of you gearing up to query up a storm that weekend, but honestly, you might want to hold off for a week or two. And whatever you do, do not send an e-mailed query over a long weekend; the probability of getting rejected skyrockets.

Why, you shriek in horror? Millie’s inbox overfloweth on pretty much any Monday, because writers tend to have more time on the weekends. Labor Day weekend is especially popular, because so many of you have been tapping your toes impatiently, waiting for agencies to become populated again. By restraining yourself until, say, Wednesday, your e-mailed query

“But Anne,” I hear some reformed scoffers point out, “why shouldn’t I add my query letter to that pile? Won’t they answer them in the order received?”

Well, more or less. However, Millie’s been known to be a mite grumpy until she has cleared enough desk space to set down her latte. Any guesses what the quickest way to clear a desk of queries is?

Wait until the second week of September. At least.

In the meantime — which is to say: for the next few days — I want to round off Pitchingpalooza with some in-depth discussion of how to navigate a writer’s conference. Yes, yes, I know, we’ve been talking about conferences for the last month, but be fair:: I visit the topic only once per year. It’s been a long visit this time, admittedly, of the type that may well make some of you long for the houseguests to go home, already, but still, I don’t talk about it that often.

Perhaps that’s a mistake, since writers’ conference attendance has been skyrocketing of late. Blame the hesitant economy; writing a book is a lot of people’s fallback position. Interesting, given how few novelists actually make a living at it, but hey, a dream’s a dream.

Literary conferences can be pretty hard to navigate your first time around — and that’s unfortunate, because the darned things tend not to be inexpensive. Like pitching and querying, there are some secret handshakes that enable some aspiring writers to hobnob more effectively than others, as well as norms of behavior that may seem downright perplexing to the first-time attendee.

Up to and including the fact that there’s more to getting the most out of a conference than just showing up, or even showing up and pitching. So I’m going to be talking about the nuts and bolts of conference attendance, with an eye to helping you not only pitch more successfully, but also take advantage of the often amazing array of resources available to aspiring writers at a good conference.

Not to mention feeling more comfortable in your skin while you’re there.

Last week, I brought up a couple of the more common conceptual stumbling-blocks writers tend to encounter while prepping their elevator speeches and formal pitches. The first and most virulent, of course, is coming to terms with the necessity of marketing oneâ€™s writing at all — in other words, to begin to think of it not just as one’s baby, but as a product you’re trying to sell.

Half of you just tensed up, didn’t you?

I’m not all that surprised. From an artistic perspective, the only criterion for whether an agent or editor picks up a manuscript should be the quality of the writing, followed distantly by the inherent interest of the story. For many writers, the burning question of whether a market for the book already demonstrably exists doesn’t even crop up during the composition process; they write because they are writers — and writers write.

Is anyone but me sick of that well-worn tautology, by the way? Is it actually any more profound than saying that spelunkers explore caves, or that orchard-tenders have been known to pick the occasional apple?

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but books do not get published simply because someone has taken the trouble to write them — or even because they are well-written. An aspiring writer must make the case that her book is not only a great yarn, but one that will fit into the current book market neatly. And, as many a pitcher and querier knows to her sorrow, she will need to make that case before anyone in the industry be willing to take a gander at the actual writing.

I know, I know: it seems backwards. But as I believe I have mentioned approximately 1704 times before, I did not set up the prevailing conditions for writers; I merely try to cast them in comprehensible terms for all of you.

If I ran the universe — which, annoyingly, I still donâ€™t, as nearly as I can tell — writers would be able to skip the pitch-and-query stage entirely, simply submitting the manuscripts directly with no marketing materials, to allow the writing to speak for itself. Every submitter would receive thoughtful, helpful, generous-minded feedback, too, and enchanted cows would wander the streets freely, giving chocolate- and strawberry-flavored milk to anyone who wanted it — or soy milk to the lactose-intolerant. I might even spring for wandering pixies wielding juicers, to bring orange, mango, and kale juice to a neighborhood near you.

But I do not, alas, run the universe, so SeÃ±or Saramago and certain aspects of the publishing industry are likely to remain mysteries eternal. (What harm would it have done him to use a period at the end of a sentence occasionally? Or a question mark at the end of a question?)

Long-time readers, chant it with me now: no matter how talented you are, if you hope to get published, the marketing step is a necessity. Even if you were Stephen King, William Shakespeare, and Madame de StaÃ«l rolled into one, in the current writersâ€™ market, you would still need to approach many, many agents and/or editors to find the right match for your work — and your work would stand a much, much better chance if you talk about it in the language of the industry.

That’s true, incidentally, even if you approach an agent whose submission guidelines ask writers to send pages along with the initial query, instead of by special request afterward (as used to be universal). If the marketing approach is not professionally crafted, chances are slim that those pages will even get read.

Oh, there you go, gasping again, but honestly, this is a simple matter of logistics. Remember, a good agency typically receives somewhere between 800 and 1500 queries per week. If Millicent isn’t wowed by the letter, she simply doesn’t have time to cast her eyes over those 5 or 10 or 50 pages the agency’s website said that you could send.

That’s not being mean. That’s trying to get through all of those queries without working too much overtime.

Unfortunately, the imperative to save time usually also dictates form-letter rejections that the querier entirely in the dark about whether the rejection trigger was in the query or the pages. (Speaking of realistic expectations, please tell me that you didn’t waste even thirty seconds of YOUR precious time trying to read actual content into it didn’t grab me, I just didn’t fall in love with it, it doesn’t meet our needs that this time, or any of the other standard rejection generalities. By definition, one-size-fits-all reasons cannot possibly tell you how to improve your submission.)

All of which is to say: please, I implore you, do not make the very common mistake of believing that not being picked up by the first agent whom you pitch or query means that your work is not marketable. Or of adhering to the even more common but less often spoken belief that if a book were really well written, it would somehow be magically exempted from the marketing process.

It doesn’t, and it isn’t. Unrealistic expectations about the pitching — and querying — process can and do not only routinely make aspiring writers unhappy at conferences the world over, but frequently also prevent good writers from pitching well.

Yes, you read that correctly. Operating on misinformation can genuine hurt a writer, as can a fearful or resentful attitude. Part of learning to pitch — or query — successfully entails accepting the fact that from the industryâ€™s point of view, you are presenting a PRODUCT to be SOLD.

Not, as the vast majority of writers believe, and with good reason, a piece of one’s soul ripped off without anesthesia.

So it is a teeny bit counter-productive to respond — as an astonishingly high percentage of first-time pitchers do — to the expectation that they should be able to talk about their books in market-oriented terms as evidence that they are dealing with Philistines who hate literature.

To clear up any possible confusion for the high-browed: you should, and they donâ€™t.

Why do so many pitchers respond to the pros as though they were evil demons sent to earth for the sole purpose of tormenting the talented and rewarding the illiterate? Selling books is how agents and editors make their livings, after all: they have to be concerned about whether thereâ€™s a market for a book they are considering.

They’re not being shallow; they’re being practical.

Okay, most of them are not just being shallow. My point, should you care to know it: a pitching appointment is not the proper venue for trying to change the status quo. Querying or pitching is hard enough to do well without simultaneously decrying the current realities of book publishing.

And yes, in response to that question your brain just shouted, aspiring writers do bring that up in their pitches and queries. All the time. Heck, it’s not all that unusual for a pitcher to mention that the book has been rejected before, and how often.

Don’t emulate their example. Trust me on this one: it’s not going to make your book seem more market-ready to bring up that you’ve already queried it 700 times.

That isn’t just poor strategy — it’s symptomatic of a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes an author successful. Selling is a word that many writers seem to find distasteful when applied to trying to land an agent, as if there were no real distinction between selling one’s work (most of the time, the necessary first step to the world’s reading it) and selling out (which entails a compromise of principle.)

C’mon — you know what I’m talking about; if not, just bring up the issue over a sandwich at your next writers’ conference. This is a real, vitriol-stained topic in writers’ circles.

When aspiring writers speak of marketing amongst themselves, it tends to be with a slight curl of the lip, an incipient sneer, as if the mere fact of signing with an agent or getting a book published would be the final nail in the coffin of artistic integrity. While practically everyone who writes admires at least one or two published authors — all of whom, presumably, have to deal with this issue at one time or another — the prospect of compromising oneâ€™s artistic vision haunts many a writerâ€™s nightmares.

That’s a valid fear, I suppose, but allow me to suggest another, less black-and-white possibility: fitting the square peg of one’s book into the round holes of marketing can be an uncomfortable process, but that doesn’t mean it is inherently deadly to artistic integrity. It also doesnâ€™t mean that any writer, no matter how talented, can legitimately expect to be commercially successful without going through that process.

That is not to say there are not plenty of good reasons for writers to resent how the business side of the industry works — there are, and itâ€™s healthy to gripe about them. Resent it all you want privately, or in the company of other writers.

But do not, I beg you, allow that resentment to color the pitch you ultimately give. Or the query letter.

I know, I know: if you’ve been hanging out at conferences for a while, deep-dyed cynicism about the book market can start to sound a whole lot like the lingua franca. One can get a lot of social mileage out of being the battle-scarred submission veteran who tells the new recruits war stories — or the pitcher in the group meeting with an editor who prefaces his comments with, “Well, this probably isn’t the right market for this book concept, but…”

To those who actually work in the industry, complaining about the current market’s artistic paucity will not make you come across as serious about your work — as it tends to do amongst other writers, admittedly. The pros just hear it too often. As a result, such complaints are likely to insult the very people who could help you get beyond the pitching and querying stage.

Yes, you may well gulp. To an agentâ€™s ears, writers who complain about how much harder it is to get one’s work read than even ten years ago — it’s not your imagination — tend to sound, well, naÃ¯ve. Of course it’s hard to break into the business; simple math dictates that.

“What does your perhaps well-founded critique of how the industry works have to do with whether I want to read your manuscript?” the pros murmur as writers lecture them on how it really should be easier. “I’m sitting right here — wouldn’t this time be better spent telling me what your book is about?”

Besides, neither a pitch meeting nor a query letter is primarily about writing, really. They’re both about convincing agents and editors that here is a story or topic that can sell to a particular target audience.

If your pitch convinces them that your work falls into that category, then they will ask to see pages. Out comes the broken record again:

Contrary to what the vast majority of aspiring writers believe, the goal of the pitch (and the query letter) is not to make the business side of the industry fall in love with your writing, per se — itâ€™s to get the agent or editor to whom it is addressed to ask to see manuscript pages or a proposal.

Then, and only then, is it logically possible for them to fall in love with your prose stylings or vigorous argument. I’ve said it before, and I’ll doubtless say it again: no one in the world can judge your writing without reading it.

This may seem obvious outside the context of a pitching or querying experience, but itâ€™s worth a reminder during conference season. Too many writers walk out of pitching meetings or recycle rejections from queries believing, wrongly, that theyâ€™ve just been told that they cannot write. Itâ€™s just not true.

But by the same token, a successful verbal pitch or enthusiastically-received query letter is not necessarily a ringing endorsement of writing talent, either. Both are merely the marketing materials intended to prompt a request to see the writing itself.

Which means, of course, that if you flub your pitch, you should not construe that as a reflection of your writing talent, either; logically, it cannot be, unless the agent or editor takes exception to how you construct your verbal sentences.

I know, I know, it doesnâ€™t feel that way at the time, and frankly, the language that agents and editors tend to use at moments like these (â€œNo one is buying X anymore,â€ or “I could have sold that story ten years ago, but not now”) often does make it sound like a review of your writing. But it isnâ€™t; it canâ€™t be.

All it can be, really, is a statement of belief about current and future conditions on the book market, not the final word about how your book will fare there. Just as with querying, if an agent or editor does not respond to your pitch, just move on to the next prospect on your list.

Does any of that that make you feel better about the prospect of walking into a pitch meeting? Did it at least permit you to get good and annoyed at the necessity of pitching and querying, to allow all of that frustration to escape your system?

Good. Now youâ€™re ready to prep your pitch.

Did I just sense some eye-rolling out there? “But Anne,” I hear some chronically sleep-deprived preppers cry, “can’t you read a calendar? I’ve been working on my pitch for weeks now. I keep tinkering with it; I know I have the perfect pitch in me, but I can’t seem to bring it out.”

I know precisely what you mean. After staring for so long at a single page of text (which is, after all, what a formal pitch ends up being, at most), it can feel like it’s taken over one’s life. As with any revision process, either on oneâ€™s own work or othersâ€™, one can become a touch myopic, both literally and figuratively.

How myopic, you ask? Let me share an anecdote of the illustrative variety.

A couple of years ago, I went on a week-long writing retreat in another state in order to make a small handful of revisions to a novel of mine. Small stuff, really, but my agent was new to the project (having inherited it when my original agent went on maternity leave) and wanted me to give the work a slightly different spin before he started submitting it. Basically, he wanted it to sound a bit more like his type of book, the kind editors had grown to expect from his submissions. Perfectly legitimate, of course (if it doesn’t sound like that to you, please see both the GETTING GOOD AT ACCEPTING FEEDBACK and HOW TO BE AN AGENT’S DREAM CLIENT categories on the list at right before you even consider getting involved with an agent), and I’m glad to report that the revisions went smoothly.

At the end of my week of intensive revision, a friend and her 6-year-old daughter were kind enough to give me, my computer, and my many empty bottles of mineral water (revision is thirsty work, after all, and the retreat did not offer glass recycling) a ride back from my far-flung retreat site. Early in the drive, my friend missed a turn, and made a not entirely flattering reference to her Maker.

Nothing truly soul-blistering, mind you, just a little light taking of the Lordâ€™s name in vain. Fresh from vacation Bible school, her daughter pointed out, correctly, that her mother had just broken a commandment and should be ashamed of herself. (Apparently, her school hadnâ€™t yet gotten to the one about honoring thy father and thy mother.)

â€œNot if God wasnâ€™t capitalized,â€ I said without thinking. â€œIf itâ€™s a lower-case g, she could have been referring to any god. Apollo, for example, or Zeus. For all we know, they may kind of like being berated in moments of crisis. It could make them feel important.â€

Now, that was a pretty literal response, and one that generated a certain amount of chagrin when the little girl repeated it in her next Sunday school class. Not that I wasnâ€™t technically correct, of course, but I should have let the situation determine what is an appropriate response. Sometimes, you just have to go with the flow.

That’s true in pitching, too. Hyper-literalism can cause quite a bit of unnecessary stress during conference prep. In part, thatâ€™s the nature of the beast: since aspiring writers are not told nearly enough about what to expect from a pitching appointment (or a potential response to a query), they tend to grasp desperately at what few guidelines they are given, following them to the letter.

To a certain extent, that makes perfect sense: when going into an unfamiliar, stressful situation, itâ€™s natural to want to cling to rules. The trouble, as I have pointed out throughout this series, is that not everything writers are told about pitching, querying, or even — dare I say it? — what does and doesnâ€™t sell in writing is applicable to their individual situations, or even up-to-date. Adhering too closely to the wrong rules can be a serious liability.

Anyone who has ever attended a writersâ€™ conference has seen the result: the causalities of hyper-literalism abound.

Since not all of you are nodding sagely, allow let me take you on a guided tour: thereâ€™s the writer who lost precious hours of sleep last night because her prepared pitch is four sentences long, instead of three; thereâ€™s the one who despairs because heâ€™s been told that he should not read his pitch, but memorize it, but stress has turned his brain into Swiss cheese. The guy over here is working so many dashes, commas, and semicolons into his three-sentence pitch that it goes on for six minutes — but has only three periods. In another corner mopes the romance writer who has just heard an agent say that sheâ€™s not looking for Highland romances anymore; naturally, the writer hears this as no one is looking to acquire your kind of book any more.

You get the picture. As writers listen to litanies of what they are doing wrong, and swap secrets they have learned elsewhere, the atmosphere becomes palpably heavy with depression.

By the end of the conference, the truisms all of these individuals have shared will have bounced around, mutating like the messages in the childrenâ€™s game of Telephone. That, combined with days on end of every word each attending agent, editor, and/or teacher utters being treated with the reverence of Gospel, there is generally a whole lot of rule-mongering going on. And if a writer has a sound analytical mind, he is apt to notice that a heck of a lot of those rules are mutually contradictory.

Take a nice, deep breath. The industry is not trying to trick you. What it is trying to do is get you to adhere to under-advertised publishing norms. While some of those norms are indeed inflexible — the rigors of standard manuscript format, for instance — most of the time, you will be fine if you adhere to the spirit of the norm, rather than its letter.

So those of you who are freaking out about a few extra words in your elevator speech: donâ€™t. It needs to be short, but it is far better to take an extra ten seconds to tell your story well than to cut it so short that you tell it badly. No agent or editor in the world is going to be standing over you while you pitch, abacus in hand, ready to shout at you to stop once you reach 101 words in a hallway pitch, any more than she will be counting its periods.

Admittedly, they may begin to get restive if you go on too long — but in conversation, length is not measured in number of words or frequency of punctuation. It is measured in the passage of time.

Let me repeat that, because I think some pitchers’ concerns on the subject are based in a misunderstanding born of the ubiquity of the three-sentence pitch: the purpose of keeping the elevator speech to 3-4 sentences is not because there is some special virtue in that number of sentences, but to make sure that the elevator speech is short enough that you could conceivably blurt it out in 30-45 seconds.

Thus the term. The elevator speech should be sufficiently brief to leave your lips comprehensibly between the time the elevator shuts on you and the agent of your dreams on the ground floor and when it opens again on the second floor.

Remember, though, that no matter what you may have heard, an elevator speech is not a formal pitch but a curtailed version of it. The elevator speech, hallway pitch, and pitch proper are primarily differentiated by the length of time required to say them.

So if you feel the urge to be nit-picky, put that energy to good use: it actually makes far more sense to time your pitch than it does to count the words. Try to keep your elevator speech under 45 seconds, your hallway pitch to roughly 60 â€“ 75 seconds max, and your pitch proper to 2 minutes or so.

But do not, I beg you, rend your hair in the midnight hours between now and your next pitching opportunity trying to figure out how to cut your pitch from 2 minutes, 15 seconds down to 2, or plump it up from a minute seventeen to 2, just because I advise that as a target length.

I’m not going to be standing there with a stopwatch, any more than an agent is. And until I rule the universe, I can pretty much guarantee that no agent or editor, even my own, is ever going to say, “Well, that WOULD have been a great pitch, but unfortunately, it was 17.4 seconds longer than Anne Mini says it should be, so I’m going to have to pass.”

Even if I did rule the universe (will someone get on that, please?), no one would ever say that to you. It’s in your best interest to adhere to the spirit of my advice on the pitch — or anyone else’s — not necessarily the letter.

How might one go about doing that? Well, remember that elevator speech I wrote a couple of weeks ago for PRIDE AND PREJUDICE?

19th-century 19-year-old Elizabeth Bennet has a whole host of problems: a socially inattentive father, an endlessly chattering mother, a sister who spouts aphorisms as she pounds deafeningly on the piano, two other sisters who swoon whenever an Army officer walks into the room, and her own quick tongue, any one of which might deprive Elizabeth or her lovely older sister Jane of the rich husband necessary to save them from being thrown out of their house when their father dies. When wealthy humanity-lover Mr. Bingley and disdainful Mr. Darcy rent a nearby manor house, Elizabethâ€™s mother goes crazy with matchmaking fever, jeopardizing Janeâ€™s romance with Bingley and insisting that Elizabeth marry the first man who proposes to her, her unctuous cousin Mr. Collins, a clergyman who has known her for less than a week. After the familyâ€™s reputation is ruined by her youngest sisterâ€™s seduction by a dashing army officer, can Elizabeth make her way in the adult world, holding true to her principles and marrying the man she passionately loves, or will her familyâ€™s prejudices doom her and Jane to an impecunious and regretful spinsterhood?

Because I love you people, I went back and timed how long it would take me to say: sixty- two seconds, counting gestures and vocal inflections that I would consider necessary for an effective performance. Thatâ€™s perfectly fine, for either a hallway speech or pitch proper. Actually, for a pitch proper, I would go ahead and add another sentence or two of glowing detail.

To be fair, though, it is a bit long for an elevator speech, if I intended to include any of the magic first hundred words as well. If I had just spent a weekend prowling the halls, buttonholing agents for informal hallway pitches, I would have tried to shear off ten seconds or so, so I could add at the beginning that the book is women’s fiction and the title.

Oh, and to have the time to indicate that my parents loved me enough to give me a name, and manners enough to share it with people when I first meet them. But seriously, I would not lose any sleep over those extra ten seconds, if I were pinched for time. Nor should you.

Brevity is not, however, the only virtue a pitch should have, any more than every single-page letter in the world is automatically a stellar query. If youâ€™re marketing a novel, you need to demonstrate two things: that this is a good story, and that you are a good storyteller. Similarly, if you are pitching a NF book, you need to show in your pitch that this is a compelling topic, and that you are the world’s best-equipped person to write about it.

As any good storyteller can tell you, compelling storytelling lies largely in the scintillating details. I have been listening to writersâ€™ pitches for significantly longer than I have been giving them myself — in addition to my adult professional experience, I also spent part of my wayward youth trailing a rather well-known author around to SF conventions; aspiring writers were perpetually leaping out from behind comic books and gaming tables to tell him about their book — so I can tell you with authority: far more pitches fail due to being full of generalities than because they have an extra fifteen secondsâ€™ worth of fascinating details.

Embrace the spirit of brevity, not the letter. If you must add an extra second or two in order to bring in a particularly striking visual image, or to mention a plot point that in your opinion makes your book totally unlike anything else out there, go ahead and do it.

Revel in this being the one and only time that any professional editor will ever tell you this: try not to be too anal-retentive about adhering to pre-set guidelines. It will only make you tense.

As the song says, keep those spirits high, pulses low. Oh, and keep up the good work!

Wouldn’t you have assumed, campers, that yesterday’s little foray into obscure editorial pet peeves would have worked some nit-picking vim out of my system? Not so, apparently. This evening, my dinner companion and I made the mistake of allowing the waitress in our neighborhood sushi place to seat us near a comely matron lecturing her rather obnoxious college-age daughters. They lectured right back at her, sometimes simultaneously. All three spoke in tones that, while perhaps not quite capable of waking the dead, would at least prompt the critically wounded to drag themselves bodily into another room, if not another county, in order to escape the non-stop barrage of chatter.

And you know how I’m always pointing out that while realistic dialogue is wonderful on the page, real-life dialogue tends to be stultifying, due to its tendency to repeat itself? Had this trio been providing the listen and repeat audio for a college language lab, they could hardly have reused phrases more. Adding to the fun, the younger daughter had such an unparalleled gift for cliché that the average greeting card would have found her observations unbearably banal.

Since carrying on a conversation at our table was hopeless, I did what any self-respecting editor would have done: toyed with my asparagus tempura and mentally trimmed entire paragraphs out of the dialogue blasting through the restaurant. I was busily engaged in running a mental red pencil line through the younger daughter’s third “you can’t judge a man until you walk a mile in his moccasins” of the evening when the mother’s monologue veered abruptly into a discussion of DON QUIXOTE.

Frankly, I thought that I was dreaming (speaking of clichés). Although the lady seemed to have trouble recalling author’s name, her analysis was surprisingly trenchant — so much so that I almost stopped editing it. (The younger daughter’s frequent observation that the book was a classic still had to go, however.) She began talking about how a young friend of hers had responded to the book. It sounded as though they might have been reading it together.

She referred to her co-reader as — oh, I tremble to relate it — her mentee. As in the person who sits at the feet of a mentor, drinking in wisdom.

I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Protégé,” I said, loudly enough to be heard over the ambient din. “You mean protégé. Unless, of course, you are referring to the Mentor of classical myth, in which case the student would be Telemachus.”

Dead silence from the other table, but several other diners spontaneously burst into applause. The mother waved frantically at the waitress for her check.

As they left, glaring at me viciously, I thought about informing them that the author of DON QUIXOTE was Miguel Cervantes. But as he wrote the immortal line, “A closed mouth catches no flies,” I thought better of it.

See to what extremes a life of editing drives otherwise perfectly reasonable people? Naturally, I was aware that the mother had not coined the term mentee on the spot; based on her highly redundant anecdotal style, she lacked the essential creativity to add a new word to the language. It’s one of those annoying business-speak terms that has somehow worked its way into everyday speech. I might have let it pass had the speaker and her progeny not spent half an hour boring me and everyone else in the restaurant to the verge of extinction.

That level of touchiness is roughly what the average pitch-hearer reaches by the tenth or twelfth similar pitch of the conference. By the fiftieth or sixtieth, she’s not only ready to correct the verbal gaffes of passersby — she’s praying that some kind muse will take pity on her and drop an anvil on her head. Anything, so she does not have to listen to yet another cliché-ridden summary of a plot that sounds suspiciously like the first TWILIGHT book.

Chant it with me now, campers: the first rule of pitching is thou shalt not bore. The second is the pitcher is there to hear your original ideas and language. Stock phrases, no matter how apt, are unlikely to make your premise shine; a description so general that your book will merge in the hearer’s mind with a dozen others is not the best way to make yours memorable.

You’re a writer, are you not? Is there a reason that your pitch should not demonstrate that you have some talent in that direction?

Why, we were just talking about that, weren’t we? Last time, I went over the basic format of a 2-minute pitch, the kind a writer is expected to give within the context of a scheduled pitch meeting. Unlike the shorter elevator speech or hallway pitch, the formal pitch is intended not merely to pique the hearer’s interest in the book, but to convey that the writer is one heck of a storyteller, whether the book is fiction or nonfiction.

In case that’s too subtle for anyone, I shall throw a brick through the nearest window and shout: no matter what kind of prose you write, your storytelling skills are part of what you are selling here.

How might a trembling author-to-be demonstrate those skills? Basically, by dolling up her elevator speech with simply fascinating details and fresh twists that will hold the hearer in thrall.

At least for two minutes. After that, the agent’s going to have to ask to read your book to find out what happens.

Because sounding scintillating to the pitch-fatigued is a genuinely tall order, it is absolutely vital that you prepare for those two minutes in advance, either timing yourself at home or by buttonholing like-minded writers at the conference for mutual practice. Otherwise, as I mentioned in passing last time, it is very, very easy to start rambling once you are actually in your pitch meeting.

Frankly, the length of the pitch appointment typically doesn’t allow any time for rambling or free-association. Rambling, unfortunately, tends to lead the pitcher away from issues of marketing and into the kind of free-form discussion he might have with another writer. All too often, pitchers will digress into artistic-critical questions (“What do you think of multiple protagonists in general?”), literary-philosophical issues (“I wanted to experiment with a double identity in my romance novel, because I feel that Descartian dualism forms the underpinnings of the modern Western love relationship.”), and autobiographical observations (“I spent 17 years writing this novel. Please love it, or I shall impale myself on the nearest sharp object.”) .

Remember, you are marketing a product here: talk of art and theory can come later, after you’ve signed a contract with this agent or that editor. For now, your job is to wow ‘em with the originality of your book concept, the freshness of your approach, and the evocative language of your pitch.

Don’t forget that that the formal pitch is, in fact, is an extended, spoken query letter; it should contain, at minimum, the same information. Like any good promotional speech, it also needs to present the book as both unique and memorable.

Oh, you would like to know how to go about that, would you? Glad you asked. Time to whip out one of my famous lists of tips.

(1) Emphasize the most original parts of your story or argument One great way to increase the probability of its seeming both is to include beautifully-phrased telling details from the book, something that the agent or editor is unlikely to hear from anybody else. What specifics can you use to describe your protagonist’s personality, the challenges he faces, the environment in which he functions, that render each different from any other book currently on the market?

See why I suggested earlier in this series that you might want to gain some familiarity with what is being published right now in your book category? Unless you know what’s out there, how can you draw a vibrant contrast?

I sense a touch of annoyance out there, don’t I? “But Anne,” a disgruntled soul or two protests, “I understand that part of the point here is to present my book concept as fresh, but I’m going to be talking about my book for two minutes, at best. Do I really want to waste my time on a compare-and-contrast exercise when I could be showing (not telling) that my book is in fact unique?”

Well, I wasn’t precisely envisioning that you embark upon a master’s thesis on the literary merits of the current thriller market; what I had in mind was your becoming aware enough of the current offerings to know what about your project is going to seem most unusual to someone who has been marinating in the present offerings for the last couple of years.

Regardless of how your book is fresh, you’re going to want to be as specific as possible about it. Which leads me to…

Not very — which means that including these details in the pitch is going to surprise the hearer a little. And that, in turn, will render the pitch more memorable.

(3) Broaden your scope a little. In a hallway pitch, of course, you don’t have the luxury of including more than a couple of rich details, but the 2-minute pitch is another kettle of proverbial fish. You can afford the time to flesh out the skeleton of your premise and story arc. You can, in fact, include a small scene.

So here’s a wacky suggestion: take fifteen or twenty seconds of those two minutes to tell the story of ONE scene in vivid, Technicolor-level detail.

I’m quite serious about this. It’s an unorthodox thing to do in a pitch, but it works all the better for that reason, if you can keep it brief AND fresh.

Yes, even if the book in question is a memoir — or a nonfiction book about an incident that took place in 512 BC, for that matter. To render any subject interesting to a reader, you’re going to need to introduce an anecdote or two. This is a fabulous opportunity to flex your show-don’t-tell muscles.

Which is, if you think about it, why a gripping story draws us in: good storytelling creates the illusion of being there. By placing the pitch-hearer in the middle of a vividly-realized scene, you make him more than a listener to a summary — you let him feel a part of the story.

(4) Borrow a page from Scheherazade’s book: don’t tell too much of the story; leave the hearer wanting more. Remember, the pitcher’s job is not to summarize the plot or argument — it’s to present it in a fascinating manner. After all, the point of the pitch is to convince the agent or editor to ask to read the manuscript, right? So focusing on making the premise sound irresistible is usually a better plan than trying to cram the entire story arc into a couple of breathless paragraphs.

Don’t be afraid to introduce a cliffhanger at the end of your pitch– scenarios that leave the hearer wondering how the heck is this author going to get her protagonist out of THAT situation? can work very, very well in this context.

(5) Axe the jargon. Many pitchers (and queriers, actually) assume, wrongly, that if their manuscripts are about people who habitually use an industry-based jargon, it will make their pitches more credible if that language permeates the 2-minute speech. In fact, the opposite is generally true: terminology that excludes outsiders usually merely perplexes the pitch hearer.

Remember, it’s never safe to assume that any given agent or editor (or Millicent, for that matter) has any background in your chosen subject matter. It would behoove you, then, to use language in your pitch that everybody in the publishing industry can understand.

Unless, of course, your book is about the publishing industry, in which case you may be as jargon-ridden as you like.

(6) Delve into the realm of the senses. Another technique that helps elevate memorability: including as many sensual words and images as you can in your pitch. Not sexual ones, necessarily, but referring to the operation of the senses. As anyone who has spent even a couple of weeks reading submissions or contest entries can tell you, the vast majority of writing out there sticks to the most obvious senses — sight and sound — probably because these are the two to which TV and movie scripts are limited.

So a uniquely-described scent, taste, skin sensation, or pricking of the sixth sense does tend to be memorable. I just mention.

How might you go about this, you ask? Comb the text itself. Is there an indelible visual image in your book? Work it in. Are birds twittering throughout your tropical romance? Let the agent hear them. Is your axe murderer concentrating his professional efforts on chefs? We’d better taste some fois gras.

And so forth. The goal here is to include a single original image or scene in sufficient detail that the agent or editor will think, “Wow, I’ve never heard that before,” and ask to read the book.

Which leads me to ask those of you whose works are still in the writing phase: are there places in your manuscript where you could beef up the comic elements, sensual details, elegant environmental descriptions, etc., to strengthen the narrative and to render the book easier to pitch when its day comes?

Just something to ponder.

(7) Make sure that your pitch contains at least one detailed, memorable image. There is a terrific example of such a pitch in the Robert Altman film THE PLAYER, should you have time to check it out before the next time you plan to pitch. The protagonist is an executive at a motion picture studio; throughout the film, he hears many pitches. One unusually persistent director chases the executive all over the greater LA metro area, trying to get him to listen to his pitch. (You’re in exactly the right mental state to appreciate that now, I’m guessing.) Eventually, the executive gives in, and tells the director to sell him the film in 25 words or less.

Rather than launching into the plot of the film, however, the director does something interesting: he spends a good 30 seconds setting up the initial visual image of the film: a group of protestors holding a vigil outside a prison during a rainstorm, their candles causing the umbrellas under which they huddle to glow like Chinese lanterns.

”That’s nice,” the executive says, surprised. “I’ve never seen that before.”

Pitching success!

If a strong, memorable detail of yours can elicit this kind of reaction from an agent or editor, you’re home free. Give some thought to where your book might offer up the scene, sensual detail, or magnificently evocative sentence that will make ‘em do a double-take.

Or a spit-take, if your book is a comedy. Which brings me to…

(8) Let the tone of the pitch reflect the tone of the book. This one’s just common sense, really: an agent or editor who likes a particular kind of book enough to handle it routinely may reasonably be expected to admire that kind of writing, right? So why not write the pitch in the tone and language you already know has pleased this person in the past?

A good pitch for a funny book makes its premise seem amusing; a great pitch contains at least one line that provokes a spontaneous burst of laughter from the hearer. By the same token, while a good pitch for a romance would make it sound like a fun read, a great pitch might prompt the hearer to say, “Is it getting hot in here?”

Getting the picture?

I’m tempted to sign off for the day to allow all of you to rush off to stuff your pitches to the gills with indelible imagery, sensual details, and book category-appropriate mood-enhancers, but I know from long experience teaching writers to pitch that some of your manuscripts will not necessarily fit comfortably into the template I’ve laid out over the last couple of posts. To head off one of the more common problems at the pass, I’m going to revive a reader’s excellent question about the pitch proper from years past. (Keep ‘em coming, folks!)

Somewhere back in the dim mists of time, sharp-eyed reader Colleen wrote in to ask how one adapts the 2-minute pitch format to stories with multiple protagonists — a more difficult task than it might appear at first glance. By definition, it would be pretty hard to pitch it as just one of the characters’ being an interesting person in an interesting situation; in theory, a good multiple-protagonist novel is the story of LOTS of interesting people in LOTS of interesting situations.

So what’s the writer to do? Tell the story of the book in the pitch, not the stories of the various characters.

Does that sound like an oxymoron? Allow me to explain. For a novel with multiple protagonists to work, it must have an underlying unitary story — it has to be, unless the chapters and sections are a collection of unrelated short stories. (Which would make it a short story collection, not a novel, and should be pitched as such.) Even if it is told from the point of view of many, many people, there is pretty much always some point of commonality.

That area of commonality should be the focus of your pitch, not how many characters’ perspectives it takes to tell it. Strip the story to its basic elements, and pitch that.

Those of you juggling many protagonists just sighed deeply, didn’t you? “But Anne,” lovers of group dynamics everywhere protest, “why should I limit myself to the simplest storyline? Doesn’t that misrepresent my book?”

Not more than other omissions geared toward pitch brevity — you would not, for instance, take up valuable pitching time in telling an agent that your book was written in the third person, would you? (In case the answer isn’t obvious: no, you shouldn’t. Let the narrative choices reveal themselves when the agent reads your manuscript.) Even in the extremely unlikely event that your book is such pure literary fiction that the characters and plot are irrelevant, concentrating instead upon experiments in writing style, your book is still about something, isn’t it?

That something should be the subject of your pitch. Why? Because any agent is going to have to know what the book is about in order to interest an editor in it. And it’s unlikely to the point of hilarity that she’ll stop you immediately after you say, “Well, my novel is told from the perspectives of three different protagonists…” with a curt, “I’ve heard enough; I’ve been looking for a good multiple-perspective novel. Allow me to sign you on the spot.”

How you have chosen to construct the narrative is not information that should be in your pitch. The agent or editor is going to want to know what the book is about.

“Okay,” the sighers concede reluctantly, “I can sort of see that, if we want to reduce the discussion to marketing terms. But I still don’t understand why simplifying my extraordinarily complex plot would help my pitch.”

Well, there’s a practical reason — and then there’s a different kind of practical reason. Let’s take the most straightforward one first.

From a pitch-hearer’s point of view, once more than a couple of characters have been introduced within those first couple of sentences, new names tend to blur together like extras in a movie, unless the pitcher makes it absolutely clear how they are all tied together. Typically, therefore, they will assume that the first mentioned by name is the protagonist.

So if you started to pitch a multiple protagonist novel on pure plot — “Bernice is dealing with trying to run a one-room schoolhouse in Morocco, while Harold is coping with the perils of window-washing in Manhattan, and Yvonne is braving the Arctic tundra…” — even the most open-minded agent or editor is likely to zone out. There’s just too much to remember.

And if remembering three names in two minutes doesn’t strike you as a heavy intellectual burden, please see my earlier post on pitch fatigue.

It’s easy to forget that yours is almost certainly not the only pitch that agent or editor has heard within the last 24 hours, isn’t it, even if you’re not trying to explain a book with several protagonists? Often, pitchers of multiple-protagonist novels will make an even more serious mistake than overloading their elevator speeches with names. They will frequently begin by saying, “Okay, so there are 18 protagonists…”

Actually, from the writer’s point of view, there’s an excellent reason to include this information: the different perspectives are an integral part of the story being told. Thus, the reader’s experience of the story is going to be inextricably tied up with how it is written.

But that doesn’t mean that this information is going to be helpful to your pitch. I mean, you could conceivably pitch Barbara Kingsolver’s multiple-narrator THE POISONWOOD BIBLE as:

A missionary takes his five daughters and one wife to the middle of Africa. Once they manage to carve out a make-do existence in a culture that none of them really understand, what little security the daughters know is ripped from them, first by their father’s decreasing connection with reality, then by revolution.

That isn’t a bad summary of the plot, but it doesn’t really give much of a feel for the book, does it? The story is told from the perspectives of the various daughters, mostly, who really could not agree on less and who have very different means of expressing themselves.

And that, really, is the charm of the book. But if you’ll take a gander at Ms. Kingsolver’s website, you’ll see that even she (or, more likely, her publicist) doesn’t mention the number of narrators until she’s already set up the premise.

Any guesses why?

Okay, let me ask the question in a manner more relevant to the task at hand: would it be a better idea to walk into a pitch meeting and tell the story in precisely the order it is laid out in the book, spending perhaps a minute on one narrator, then moving on to the next, and so on?

In a word, no. Because — you guessed it — it’s too likely to confuse the hearer.

Hey, do you think that same logic might apply to any complicated-plotted book? Care to estimate the probability that a pitch-fatigued listener will lose track of a grimly literal chronological account of the plot midway through the second sentence?

If you just went pale, would-be pitchers, your answer was probably correct. Let’s get back to Barbara Kingsolver.

Even though the elevator speech above for THE POISONWOOD BIBLE does not do it justice, if I were pitching the book (and thank goodness I’m not; it would be difficult), I would probably use it, with a slight addition at the end:

A missionary takes his five daughters and one wife to the middle of Africa. Once they manage to carve out a make-do existence in a culture that none of them really understand, what little security the daughters know is ripped from them, first by their father’s decreasing connection with reality, then by revolution. The reader sees the story from the very different points of view of the five daughters, one of whom has a mental condition that lifts her perceptions into a completely different realm.

Not ideal, perhaps, but it gets the point across, without presenting the perspective choice as the most important thing about the book.

But most pitchers of multiple POV novels are not nearly so restrained, alas. They charge into pitch meetings and tell the story as written in the book, concentrating on each perspective in turn as the agent or editor stares back at them dully, like a bird hypnotized by a snake.

And ten minutes later, when the meeting is over, the writers have only gotten to the end of Chapter 5. Out of 27.

I can’t even begin to estimate how often I experienced this phenomenon in my pitching classes, when I was running the late lamented Pitch Practicing Palace at the Conference-That-Shall-Remain-Nameless, and even when I just happen to be passing by the pitch appointment waiting area at conferences. All too often, first-time pitchers have never talked about their books out loud before — a BAD idea– and think that the proper response to the innocent question, “So what’s your book about?” is to reel off the entire plot.

And I do mean ENTIRE. By the end of it, an attentive listener would know not only precisely what happened to the protagonist and the antagonist, but the neighbors, the city council, and the chickens at the local petting zoo until the day that all of them died.

Poor strategy, that. If you go on too long, they may well draw some unflattering conclusions about the pacing of your storytelling preferences, if you catch my drift.

This outcome is at least 27 times more likely if the book being pitched happens to be a memoir or autobiographical novel, incidentally. Again, bad idea. Because most memoir submissions are episodic, rather than featuring a strong, unitary story arc, a rambling pitching style is likely to send off all kinds of warning flares in a pitch-hearer’s mind.

And trust me, “Well, it’s based on something that actually happened to me…” no longer seems like a fresh concept the 783rd time an agent or editor hears it.

Word to the wise: keep it snappy, emphasize the storyline, and convince the hearer that your book is well worth reading before you even consider explaining why you decided to write it in the first place. And yes, both memoirists and writers of autobiographical fiction work that last bit into their pitches all the time. Do not emulate their example; it may be unpleasant to face, but nobody in the publishing industry is likely to care about why you wrote a book until after they’ve already decided that it’s marketable. (Sorry to be the one to break that to you.)

Which brings me to the second reason that it’s better to tell the story of the book, rather than the stories of each of the major characters: POV choices are a writing issue, not a storyline issue per se. While you will want to talk about some non-story elements in your pitch — the target audience, the selling points, etc. — most of the meat of the pitch is about the story (or, in the case of nonfiction, the argument) itself.

In other words, the agent or editor will learn how you tell the story from reading your manuscript; during the pitching phase, all they need to hear is the story.

Don’t believe me? When’s the last time you walked into a bookstore, buttonholed a clerk, and asked, “Where can I find a good book told from many points of view? I don’t care what it’s about; I just woke up this morning yearning for multiplicity of perspective.”

I thought not. Although if you want to generate a fairly spectacular reaction in a bored clerk on a slow day, you could hardly ask a better question.

Dig deep for those memorable details, everybody, and keep up the good work!

No, I didn’t pose that pigeon; she volunteered to be today’s illustration of a book happily inhabiting a niche market atop a well-constructed pitch. It would be a better visual metaphor if there weren’t also bricks above her, of course, but you focus on a medieval bridge, you take your chances, right?

Before I launch into today’s task in earnest, my mother has charged me to pass along an editorial admonition to you — and believe me, we do not take such decrees lightly chez Mini. Madame Mini senior desires me to inform all conscientious writers everywhere that she is darned tired of reading books and manuscripts that use each other and one another interchangeably.

That’s one of my pet peeves, too, doubtless due to my strenuously literary upbringing: each other refers to interactions between two characters, entities, or objects; one another is activity amongst 3 or more. My parents used to correct this one in conversation, as well as on the page.

And yes, that practice did rather startle anecdote-spouting dinner guests, now that you mention it. One’s standards do not evaporate just because one happens to be serving a soufflé, however.

So abandon hope, all ye who were hoping to get a sentence like Marni, Monique, and Murgatroyd looked at each other past a good, old-fashioned editor. While you’re at it, Madame Mini would also like you to start making a distinction between farther (refers to physical distance) and further (conceptual distance). There’s a pretty good reason that one doesn’t hear farthermore in casual conversation, after all.

In answer to those of you busily engaged in picking your jaws off the floor: yes, these are nit-picky distinctions, but little things like this drive classically-trained professional readers nuts. It’s inconceivable to an editor of my mother’s experience that anyone would not have learned these precepts, if not actually at their parents’ knees, then at least by the end of the fourth grade. She flatly refuses to believe that I constantly meet talented writers who — sacre bleu! — claim that they were never taught the rules governing when to use to, two, and too or there, their, and they’re.

“What do these writers do, then?” Madame Mini scoffs. “Guess?”

Judging by the average manuscript submission, I would have to say that is precisely what a lot of aspiring writers do. That, and rely too heavily upon their word processing programs’ spell- and grammar-checkers. I have yet to break it to my mother that my version of Microsoft Word not only doesn’t make the necessary each other/one another or farther/further distinctions; it frequently suggests that I should use the incorrect form of there, their, and they’re.

My neighbors who work at the Lazy M Ranch profess to have no idea why this might be the case. “Poor elementary school education?” one of them suggested. “I wasn’t sure about that rule until I was in college.”

Please don’t tell my mother. She might faint from the shock.

Actually, while we’re on the subject of looking, would you mind if I ask you to avoid a pet peeve of my own? Novelists, would you at least consider giving the phrases they looked at each other and she gave him a look a rest, please? Millicent the agency screener scarcely sees a manuscript these days that does not include one or the other within the first chapter, and often both.

It’s not merely the percussive effect of seeing the same sentences so often across so many manuscripts in any given reading day that gets her proverbial goat, you know; it’s the fact that the overwhelming majority of aspiring writers seem to believe that eye movement is an inherently interesting enough activity to deserve page space in an otherwise tightly-written narrative. From a professional reader’s perspective, it seldom is.

Remember, from a professional reader’s point of view, the bare fact that a character might have done something isn’t necessarily reason enough to for a narrative to mention it; especially in fiction and memoir, we tend to go for the character-revealing stuff. Unless the reader is shown the emotional intensity of a look, or what thoughts the author believes are being conveyed telepathically when two characters look at each other (or seventeen look at one another; it helps to see the rules in practice), all of that looking can come across as simply a substitute for more character- or situation-illuminating reactions.

Oh, it feels good to have gotten that one off my chest. Let’s get to work.

Why, you ask again? Because we writers — c’mon, admit it — have an unparalleled gift for freaking ourselves out by imagining all kinds of strange things that might be waiting for us on the other side of the pitching table. Like, for instance, an agent who cuts a writer off three sentences into a pitch given within the context of a formal meeting: “Oh, that’s the third period, I’m afraid, and you had not even gotten halfway through establishing your premise. I’m sorry; industry standards prevent me from listening to even one more word from you.”

Or an agent who shouts, “I hate your plot, your hairdo, and your tie! Begone, and never cause me to choke on my latte again.”

Or a writer’s rocketing to instant fame, fortune, and publication as a result of a particularly well-given pitch. “Oh, I don’t need to read the manuscript,” the agent in this fantasy says, clapping the lucky pitcher on the back. “Someone who can talk about a book as well as you can is obviously a talented writer. Let me introduce you to that editor standing over there at the bar that’s never more than a hundred yards from any writers’ conference in North America, so we may sign a contract immediately. Would you be available to go on Oprah next week?”

Please believe me when I say that in years and years and years of attending conferences as both would-be pitcher and presenter, I have not even heard of any of these extremes actually occurring in real life. Honest. And Oprah’s off the air, at least on network television.

As I may have hinted a few times over the last couple of weeks, adhering to the common fantasies about what can happen in a pitch meetings both raise expectations to unreasonable levels and increase anticipatory fright to the point of being crushing. Knowledge really is power, at least in this respect.

No, really. By learning what to expect, you can prepare more effectively for your appointment with an agent or editor — and psych yourself out much less in the process.

Feeling a little better about the prospect of pitch preparation? No? Okay, here’s a bit more good news to gladden your heart: if you have been following this series step by step and doing your homework, you already have almost all of the constituent parts of a persuasive formal pitch constructed.

Today, with all that under your proverbial belt, we’re going to begin to pull it all together into a two-pronged strategy for a stellar formal pitch: first, you’re going to impress ‘em by your professionalism, then you’re gonna wow ‘em with your storytelling ability.

Piece o’ cake, right?

Actually, it’s a heck of a lot easier than it sounds, once you understand what a formal pitch is and what you’re trying to achieve with it. To that end, I’m going to let you in on a little trade secret that almost always seems to get lost in discussions of how to pitch: contrary to popular opinion, a formal pitch is not just a few sentences about the premise of a book, nor is it a summary of the plot, or even a statement of the platform for a nonfiction book.

A formal book pitch is A MARKETING SPEECH, designed not only to show what your book is about, but also precisely how and why it is MARKETABLE.

Once you understand this — and once you accept that, within a publishing context, your book is not merely your baby or a work of art, but a PRODUCT that you are asking people who SELL THINGS FOR A LIVING to MARKET FOR YOU — an agent or editor’s response to your pitch is a much, much less frightening moment to contemplate. It’s not an all-or-nothing referendum on your worth as a writer or as a human being, but a PROFESSIONAL SELLER OF WRITING’s response to a proposed BOOK CONCEPT.

Regardless of whether the agent liked your tie or not. And your hair is fine, I tell you. If only you would stop thinking in all of those capital letters.

What a formal pitch meeting can and should be is the extraordinary opportunity of having an agent or editor’s undivided attention for ten minutes in order to discuss how best to market your work. For this discussion to be fruitful, it is very helpful if you can describe your work in the same terms the industry would.

Why, what a coincidence: if you will be so kind as to cast your eye back over my breakdown of Pitchingpalooza above, you will see that you have already defined your work in those terms. Aren’t you clever, to be so well prepared?

Really, you’re almost there. If it came right down to it, you could construct a quite professional short pitch from these elements alone.

Oh, wait, here is another remarkable coincidence: you already have. It’s called your hallway pitch, and I sincerely hope that those of you who are imminently conference-bound have already begun trying it out on everyone you meet. It’s a serious mistake not to speak it out loud prior to your scheduled pitch meeting, or even to the conference.

Why? Out comes the broken record again:

It takes lots of repetition to get used to hearing yourself talking about your work like a pro, rather than like a serious writer talking to other serious writers. Or a hobbyist writer talking to someone at a party kind enough to say, “Oh, you write? What kind of books?”

Why shouldn’t you talk about your work to the pros the way we talk about amongst ourselves or at a non-literary cocktail party? Well, when we’re in creative mode, we tend to speak with other writers about our hopes, fears, and difficulties — entirely appropriate, because who else is going to understand your travails better than another writer? But in a formal pitch meeting, it’s time to put aside those complicated and fascinating aspects of the creative process, and talk about the book in terms the non-creative business side of the industry can understand.

It’s time, to put it bluntly, to speak of your book as a commodity that you might conceivably want someone to buy, not as a reason to like or respect you as a creative human being. (Hey, I warned you it was going to be blunt.)

Recognizing that is not the first sign of selling out, as so many aspiring writers seem to believe: it’s an absolutely necessary step along the undiscovered (and unpaid) artist’s road to fame, fortune, and large readerships. Or even small ones.

Besides, walking into a conference believing that agencies and publishing houses are primarily non-profit institutions devoted to the charitable promotion of good art tends to lead to poor pitching. A savvy pitcher understands that good marketing and good art can are not natural enemies.

It’s imperative that your formal pitch reflect that understanding. Think about it: reputable agents and editors make their livings by selling books, after all; they are unlikely to the point of hilarity to be even remotely sympathetic to an aspiring writer who feels that his book will seem less artistically worthwhile if he knows anything about how — or even to whom — it might be sold.

That can work to your advantage: because art vs. commerce is such a common attitude, even amongst writers who have plopped down a considerable amount of money to pitch at a conference, presenting yourself as one of the few who has taken the time to learn how publishing actually works and how your book might fit into the current market will at least enjoy the benefit of novelty.

And a thousand hands just shot into the air. “I want to be the exception, Anne,” eager pitchers everywhere cry, “but I’m not sure how to force my book’s premise into a form that makes sense from a marketing perspective. How might one go about satisfying the demands of both art and commerce in a formal pitch meeting?”

I’m so glad you asked. I feel a theoretical structure about to emerge.

As in a query letter, if you can work in a flattering reference to a specific past project upon which the agent or editor has labored, even if it’s not in your genre, just after your name is a great place to do it. As in,

“Hi, my name is J.K. Rowling, and I got so excited when you said on the agents’ panel earlier that you are looking for YA books where children solve their problems without adult guidance! That sounds like a back jacket blurb for my novel. My latest project, HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE is middle-grade fiction aimed at kids who feel like outsiders. See how it grabs you…”

If you are pitching nonfiction, this is the step where you will want to mention your platform. For example,

“Hi, my name is Bill Clinton, and I used to be President of the United States. I write political books, building upon that expertise. My latest project…”

Everyone on board with that? Good. Let’s press on.

Step II: After you finish Step I, with nary a pause for breath, launch into an extended version of your elevator speech, one that introduces the protagonist, shows the essential conflict, and gives a sense of the dramatic arc or argument of the book. The resulting equation would look like this:

“(Protagonist) is in (interesting situation).” + about a 1-minute overview of the book’s primary conflicts or focus, using vivid and memorable imagery.

Again, do not even attempt to tell the entire plot. Your goal here is to get your hearer to ask to read the book you’re pitching, not to convey the plot in such detail that your hearer feels she has already read it.

This structure will work equally well for a memoir, of course. The trick is to present oneself as the protagonist — and to do that, you’re going to have to think of yourself as a character in your book, as well as its writer.

“I was in (interesting situation).” + about a 1-minute overview of the book’s primary conflicts, using vivid and memorable imagery.

For a nonfiction book that isn’t a memoir, present the central question your book will address, along with why a reader would care about it. In considering that last part, remember, you can’t safely assume that the agent or editor to whom you will be pitching will be forearmed with any prior knowledge of your subject matter. This structure tends to work:

“The world is facing (interesting situation); if it is not resolved, (insert dire consequence here).” + about a 1-minute overview of the book’s primary focus, using vivid and memorable imagery.

For fiction or memoir, make sure to identify your protagonist in the first line of your pitch– by name, never as “my protagonist,” or you will sound like you are giving a book report. Yes, yes, I know that you learned in English class that it’s spiffy to speak in terms of protagonists and antagonists, as well as to say things like, “At the climax of the book…”, but a verbal pitch is the wrong context to talk about a book as if you were writing an essay about it. It’s distancing, and many pros find it more than a bit pretentious. (True in query letters as well, by the way.)

Here’s an even better reason to identify your protagonist by name: it’s substantially easier for a hearer to identify with a named character than an amorphous one. Even better, introduce her as an active struggler in the conflict, rather than a passive victim of it. (And if you don’t know why a story about a passive protagonist is usually harder to sell than one about her more active cousin, please see the PURGING PROTAGONIST PASSIVITY category at right before your next pitch appointment.)

Step III: Then, to tie it all together, you would give the agent or editor a brief explanation of why this book will sell to your intended readership. Not a boast, mind you: analysis that demonstrates the extent of your market research.

If you have demographic information about that target market, or a comparison to a similar book released within the last five years that has sold very well, this is the time to mention it:

“I’m excited about this project, because of its (SELLING POINTS). Currently, there are (# of TARGET MARKET members) in the United States, and this book will appeal to them because (more SELLING POINTS).”

Add a little charm and stir, and voilà: the two-minute pitch. Admittedly, my method is a trifle unusual, a little offbeat structurally, but in my experience, it works. It sounds professional, while at the same time conveying both your enthusiasm for the project and a sense of how precisely the worldview of your book is unique.

Not to mention quite doable. You could manage all three of those steps in two minutes, right?

Of course you could: with aplomb, with dignity. Because, really, all you are doing here is talking about the work you love, telling your favorite story, in the language that agents and editors speak.

Once again, a forest of hands arises before my eyes. “But Anne,” some confused souls point out, “didn’t you say that most scheduled pitch meetings are around 10 minutes long? If that’s the case, why do I have to limit myself to a 2-minute pitch? Couldn’t it be, you know, 3? Or 8?”

Good question, confused ones, and here’s the answer: no, because if you went much over 2, there would not be time for subsequent conversation. Or for the agent of your dreams to interrupt you in the course of your speech in order to ask trenchant and enlightening questions.

Or to allow for time for a panicking pitcher to take a moment to compose herself, if necessary and appropriate. Aspiring writers aren’t tape recorders, you know, and most agents and editors honestly do want to give ‘em a chance to give their pitches.

The 2-minute pitch usually takes place at the very beginning of a pitch meeting; thus the imperative to introduce oneself. (You wouldn’t believe how many pitchers get so excited that they omit this essential information. Or the title of the book.) See why it’s so important to make your pitch a good yarn?

No? Was there so much going on in these last two posts that you forgot to look for a moral hidden in the midst of it all?

Excellent, if so — because that IS the moral: there’s going to be so much going on during your pitch appointment that it’s prudent to assume that it will be darned difficult to make even the most elegant story sound fresh and pithy.

Especially if you find yourself, as so many pitchers do, having a meeting under ear-splitting conditions. Remember, a high probability that you — and the agent sitting across the table from you — will be able to hear the other pitches and conversations going on around you. It’s easy for a hearer to get distracted, especially after pitch fatigue — the inevitable numbing effect on the mind of hearing many pitches over a short period of time — has started to set in.

Heck, you may find it hard to concentrate on your storyline — and you won’t even be the one who has already heard fifty pitches that day. Counterintuitive as it may seem, buttonholing an agent at a crowded luncheon or after a well-attended seminar for a hallway pitch is often a significantly quieter option than giving a 2-minute pitch during a scheduled appointment.

And yes, if I ruled the universe, this would not be the case, but apparently, conference centers fall outside the range of my scepter. Yet conference organizers are not actively trying to weed out the shy, the agoraphobic, and the noise-sensitive — although that is often the effect of a well-stocked pitching room. It’s just that space is often at a premium at a literary conference, and many conference centers have really lousy acoustics.

Or really good acoustics, depending upon how badly you want to hear the pitcher 20 feet away from you describe the gory mass murder at the center of his thriller.

Thus your goal is not merely to make the case that your book is a good one — it is to tell a story so original, in such interesting language, and with such great imagery that it will seem fresh in a pitching environment. That’s equally true for fiction and nonfiction, by the way, and even more so for memoir.

How might one go about that? In a frequently chaotic-feeling pitching situation, including vivid, surprising details is the best way I know for a good storyteller to make an exhausted agent sit up and say, “Wait a minute — I’ve never heard a tale like THAT before!”

Does this advice seem just a touch familiar? It should — it’s that old saw show, don’t tell, transplanted from the page to the pitching environment. The essence of good storytelling, after all, lies in evocative specifics, not one-size-fits-all generalities. The higher the ratio of one-of-a-kind details to summary in your pitch, the greater the probability of its being memorable.

And terrific.

Oh, there are all of those raised hands again. “But Anne,” some of these wavers protest, “I’m likely to be too nervous to remember the name of my book during my pitch meeting, much less any brilliantly vivid and pithy details I might have thought up in the solitude of my quiet room. Isn’t it just a touch unreasonable to expect me to be able to blurt ‘em out on command?”

Not really — as long as you don’t rely solely on your memory to help you through. There’s no earthly reason not to write out your 2-minute pitch on an index card or piece of paper and have it in front of you throughout the meeting.

Honest, it won’t render your pitch less impressive. As I mentioned last time, reading a formal pitch is completely acceptable; if you remember to look up occasionally, no one will fault you for reading your pitch, rather than blurting it out from memory. That way, you will be sure to hit all of those important points, as well as to include each and every memorable detail.

And no, you will not get Brownie points for reciting it from memory. This isn’t your 5th grade class’ Americana pageant, and this isn’t the Gettysburg Address — which, incidentally, Abraham Lincoln was too experienced a public speaker to attempt to give from memory.

Actually, at 267 words, the Gettysburg Address is a pretty good length guideline for a formal pitch. It’s also proof positive that it is indeed possible to work expressive language and strong imagery into a 2-minute speech. Take a gander:

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate…we cannot consecrate…we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion –that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Great speech, eh? Admittedly, my editorial hand itches to excise some of the structural redundancy, as well as some of those extraneous heres, and smooth out some of those slightly awkward subordinate clauses. (Had I mentioned that editors tend to be nit-picky?) There’s no denying, though, that this is a magnificently constructed argument.

Ever heard the story about why it’s so short? It wasn’t that Lincoln didn’t have a lot to say — he was scheduled to speak immediately after one of the greatest of living orators, Edward Everett. The opening act’s light-hearted little lecture lasted for two solid hours.

Who could compete? Lincoln knew better. Rather than fight fire with fire, he did one of the smartest things someone making a speech can do if he wants to be remembered fondly by his hearers: he made his point, and then he stopped talking.

In memory of that excellent strategic choice, let’s add another step to our formula for a formal pitch:

Step IV: once you have gone through all of the steps above, shut up and let your hearer get a word in edgewise.

Most pitchers forget this important rule, rambling on and on, even after they have reached the end of their prepared material. Or even after the agent or editor has said, “Great; send me the first chapter.”

Don’t keep trying to sell your book; it won’t help your case. It’s only polite to allow the agent to respond, to be enthusiastic.

Besides, it’s better storytelling. If even you’re going to hand your listener a cliffhanger worthy of the old Flash Gordon radio serials, it is likely to fall flat if you don’t leave time for your listener to cry, “But what happened NEXT?”

A good storyteller always leaves her audience wanting more — and a good salesperson knows when to take yes for an answer.

Most of us have been turned off by a too-hard sell in other contexts, right? If your primary concern in choosing a vehicle is the gas mileage, you’re going to start to feel impatient if the car dealer keeps rattling off details about how many bags of groceries you could fit in the trunk.

By rambling, you’ll be missing out on a golden opportunity to demonstrate what a good listener you are. Remember, you’re not only trying to convince the agent or editor that your book is well-written and interesting — you’re also, if you’re smart (and I know you are), attempting to convey that you’d be an absolute dream to work with if they signed you.

I don’t know why this point so seldom comes up in pitching classes or in agent and editor Q&As at conferences, but being a considerate, careful listener is a definite selling point for a writer. So is the ability to ask thoughtful questions and an understanding that agents and editors in fact have jobs that are extraordinarily difficult to do well.

Treating them with respect during your pitch session will go a long way toward demonstrating that you have been working those delightful skills. These are interesting human beings, after all, not publication-granting machines.

Why, there’s yet another coincidence: if you’ve been following this series from the very beginning, you have been building the knowledge base to handle your pitch encounters as professional meetings, not as Hail Mary shots at a target nearly impossible to hit. You’ve done your homework about the people to whom you are intending to pitch (or query), so you may speak to them intelligently about their work; you have performed a little market research, so you may discuss your target market and sales trends for your type of book; you have figured out why people out there will want to buy your book as opposed to any other.

Okay, you’ve caught me: I’ve been pursuing a dual agenda here. I’ve not only been helping you prepare to pitch, but I’ve been pushing you to develop the skills that will make you a great client for an agency and a wonderful writer for a publishing house. Call me zany, but I like win-win outcomes.

Next time, I shall tackle how to track down those vivid little details that will make your pitch spring to life. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Perhaps I am inspired by this genuinely gorgeous photo of Lou Gehrig — taken, I am reliably informed, in the midst of the famed “I am the luckiest man in the world” speech — but I’ve been feeling the urge to blog about memoir-writing lately, campers. I know, I know: I generally spend the annual publishing world holiday stretching from the second week of August until after Labor Day filling your heads with practical details aplenty; I am still planning to talk about querying in September. After I wrap up Pitchingpalooza next week, however, I think I shall indulge myself with some in-depth discussion of the writing about the real, both as memoir and as fiction.

So start digging up those scraps of paper marked ask Anne about this. As always, I like to incorporate readers’ concerns, questions, and ideas into all of my series. And call me psychic, but I’m willing to bet a nickel that somewhere out there at this very moment, some member of the Author! Author! community is rending her garments over some seemingly insurmountable problem in holding, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.

Oh, and I may be announcing a new contest next week. It’s been a while since I’ve offered my readers the chance to generate any new Eye-Catching Query Letter Candy (ECQLC), after all.

Back to the matter at hand: here comes the attraction for which you have all been waiting so patiently. Today, I shall begin to talk about the pitch proper, the full 2-minute marketing statement a writer is expected to give at an honest-to-goodness, meet-’em-in-the-flesh appointment with an agent or editor at a conference.

Goosebump-inducing, isn’t it? Don’t worry; you’re up for it. So far in this series, we’ve been learning how to describe our work in terms that make sense to the publishing industry, as well as how to benefit from an impromptu pitch opportunity.

Now, we are ready to stack up all of those building blocks into, well, a building.

But not right away; I shall be presenting you with step-by-step guidelines this weekend. First, because there are so many misconceptions floating around out there about what that building should look like, how many rooms it should contain, whether to call where you drink coffee the porch, the veranda, or the lanai, and someone please extricate me from this metaphor before I spontaneously begin producing blueprints, I’m going to begin not by telling you immediately how to do a pitch right, but by pointing out what the vast majority of 2-minute pitchers do wrong.

Here, for your cringing pleasure, are the most popular formal pitching faux pas, so that you may avoid them. To echo the title of this post, watch out for that tree!

(1) As with the keynote and the elevator speech, most pitchers make the mistake of trying to turn the pitch proper into a summary of the bookâ€™s plot, rather than a teaser for its premise.

That’s going to be a Herculean task for a book whose plotâ€™s complexity is much beyond the Dr. Seuss level. No wonder so many pitchers just start at page one and keep retailing details of the plot until the agent or editor says gently, “Um, I’m afraid it’s time for my next appointment.”

By which point, naturally, the pitcher has made it all the way to page 42 in a 387-page novel. Which leads me to another low-hanging branch to avoid:

(2) Most pitchers don’t stop talking when their pitches are done.

Yes, yes, I know: all throughout the posts on hallway pitching, I have been harping on the advisability of getting out there, saying your pitch, and then ceasing to have any sound coming out of your gullet. That’s as good advice for a formal pitch as for the elevator variety.

A 2-minute pitch means just that: the pitcher talks for two minutes about her manuscript. Possibly a bit more, if the agent or editor interrupts to ask questions (which is a good sign, people — don’t freeze up if it happens), but the pitch itself should not run longer.

In case I’m being too subtle here: plan to stop talking at that point.

Why? Well, among other things, you’re going to want to hear what the agent of your dreams has to say about your book project, right? Also, an active resolve to say what one has planned to say and then stop can be a powerful tool to keep a writer from rambling.

And why do writers tend to ramble in their formal pitches, other than pure, unadulterated nervousness? Glad you asked.

Now, if you have been working diligently through this series, you shouldn’t fall prey to the first problem; here at Author! Author!, we always have our fine-toothed combs at the ready, do we not? I’ve noticed , however, that my magic wand seems to have lost the ability to compel my students to say their pitches out loud to at least 25 non-threatening human beings before they even dream of trying it out on a big, scary, Bigfoot-like agent.

Okay, so maybe I was exaggerating about the Bigfoot part. Or maybe I wasn’t: having spent years holding first-time pitchers’ hands at writers’ conferences, I’m not entirely sure that some of them would have been more terrified if they were about to be trapped in a room with a yeti.

Why? Well…

(4) Most pitchers harbor an absurd prejudice in favor of memorizing their pitches, and thus do not bring a written copy with them into the pitch meeting.

This one drives me nuts, because it is 100% unnecessary: no reasonable human being, much less an agent accustomed to listening to nervous writers, is going to fault you for consulting your notes in a pitch meeting. Or even reading the pitch outright.

This is not an exercise in rote memorization, people; you don’t get extra credit for being able to give your pitch without cue cards. A successful pitch is a communication between two individuals about a manuscript. Everyone concerned loves books — so why on earth would an agent or editor object to a demonstration that you can read?

More to the point, having the text (or at least an outline) of what you want to say in your perspiring little hand is not only acceptable — it’s a grand idea. It’s smart. Its time has come.

It’s also a good idea to invest some pre-pitching energy in ramping down the terror level, because, let’s face it, this is a scary thing to do. Not because a writer might muff any of the technical aspects of pitching, but because of what’s at stake.

(5) Most pitchers don’t realize until they are actually in the meeting that part of what they are demonstrating in the 2-minute pitch is their acumen as storytellers. If, indeed, they realize it at all.

Raises the stakes something awful, doesn’t it? Relax — for someone who legitimately is a talented storyteller, coming across as one isn’t as hard as it sounds, as long as you avoid Tree #1, the temptation to summarize.

Rightly understood, the 2-minute pitch is substantially more intriguing than a mere summary: it’s an opportunity to introduce the premise, the protagonist, and the central conflicts in language and imagery that convinces the hearer that not only is this a compelling and unusual story, but that you are uniquely gifted to tell it.

Doesnâ€™t that sound like a lot more fun than trying to cram 400 pages of plot into seven or eight breathsâ€™ worth of babbling?

I’m going to assume that giant gasp I just heard was the prelude to a yes and move on. While your elevator speech is the verbal equivalent of the introduce-the-premise paragraph in your query letter (a good secondary use for an elevator speech, as I mentioned a few days back), the pitch itself is — or can be — a snapshot of the feel, the language, and the texture of the book.

Wait — is that another tree I see heading straight for us?

(6) Few pitches capture the voice of the manuscript they ostensibly represent. Instead, they tend to sound generic or vague.

Often, running afoul of Tree #6 is the result of getting bonked on the head of Tree #1: most pitchers become so obsessed with trying to stuff as many plot points as humanly possible into their limited time face-to-face with the agent that they abandon voice altogether. As is often (unfortunately) true of synopses, summary for its own sake is seldom conducive to graceful sentence construction.

Neither, alas, is a hard sell. Is that a tree I see sneaking up behind you?

(7) Too many pitches sound more like back jacket copy than a serious statement of the book’s premise and central conflict or question — and a disturbingly high percentage of these are riddled with descriptive superlatives.

You wouldn’t believe how many pitches sound like standard advertising copy. But a writer does not go to a formal pitch meeting to review her own book — she’s there to describe it.

Trust me on this one: from the pitch-hearer’s perspective, every pitch that strays into advertising-speak is going to sound very similar. All of those soi-disant the next great bestsellers, Great American Novels, the book you won’t want to misses, novels that will appeal to every woman in North America, and it’s a natural for Oprahs (which people still use, believe it or not) have one thing in common: their pitchers are wasting time that could be used to describe what is genuinely unique about the book in puffing the book concept in terms that no agent is going to believe, anyway.

Lest some of you have gotten lost whilst wandering around in that epic last sentence, let me restate that simply: boasts about the importance of a book simply do not work in pitches. Agents are accustomed to making up their own minds about manuscripts; why would they look to the writer, of all people, to provide them with a review?

So what should a savvy pitcher do instead? Here’s an idea: rather than talking about the book, why not use the 2-minute pitch as your opportunity to give the agent or editor a sense of what it would be like to READ it?

To borrow from that most useful piece of nearly universal writing advice, this is the time to show, not tell. Yes, your time is short, but youâ€™re going to want to include a few memorable details to make your pitch stand out from the crowd.

Ah, I see we are about to run afoul of another tree.

(8) Very few pitches include intriguing, one-of-a-kind details that set the book being pitched apart from all others.

Do I hear some incredulous snorts out there? â€œDetails in a 2-minute speech?â€ the scoffers say. â€œYeah, right. Why not advise me to tap-dance, wave sparklers, and paint an abstract in oils at the same time? In two minutes, I’ll barely have time to brush the edges of my plot with generalities!”

That’s an understandable response, but actually, cramming a pitch with generalities is a rather poor strategy. It’s the unholy fruit of Tree #1.

Counterintuitive? Perhaps, but the straightforward “This happens, then that happens, then that occursâ€¦â€ method tends not to be very memorable, especially within the context of a day or twoâ€™s worth of pitches that are pretty much all going to be told chronologically.

Strong imagery, on the other hand, sensual details, unusual plot twists — these jump out at the pitch-hearer, screaming, â€œHey, you — pay attention to me!â€

To understand why vivid, story-like pitches tend to be effective, sneak with me now into a garden-variety conference pitch appointment room. For the benefit of those of you who have never experienced a pitch session first-hand, let this serve as a warning: if you were expecting a quiet, intimate, church-like atmosphere, youâ€™re bound to be surprised.

If not actually stunned, because…

(9) Most pitchers assume that a pitch-hearer will hear — and digest — every word they say, yet the combination of pitch fatigue and hectic pitch environments virtually guarantee that will not be the case.

Don’t take it personally. It honestly is the nature of the beast.

In the first place, pitch appointments are notorious for being both tightly booked and running long, frequently more and more of the latter as the day goes on. But while it’s not at all uncommon for an appointment booked for 4 PM not to commence until 5:23, obviously, a pitcher cannot afford to show up late, lest his agent be the one who zips through appointments like Speedy Gonzales.

The result: the writer usually ends up waiting, gnawing her nails like a rabbit on speed, in a crowded hallway filled with similarly stressed-out people. Not an environment particularly conducive to either relaxation or concentration, both of which are desirable to attain just before entering a pitching situation.

Eventually, the writer will be led to a tiny cubicle, or perhaps a table in the middle of a room, where s/he is expected to sit across a perhaps foot-and-a-half tableâ€™s width away from a real, live agent who in all probability has drunk far more coffee that day than the human system should be able to stand, possibly to counteract the lingering effects of that big party the conference’s organizers were kind enough to throw the night before.

I don’t mean to frighten the timid by bringing up that last detail, but it’s actually not beyond belief that you might be seated close enough to the pitch recipient to smell the coffee on her breath. Or the vodka seeping out of her pores.

Heck, you might be close enough to take a whiff of all kinds of people. At a big conference, other pitchers may well be close enough for our hero/ine to reach out and touch; one may need to speak in a near-shout to be audible. Indeed, at some conferences, the pitchers simply move one seat to the right (or left, depending upon how the room is set up) to pitch to the next agent or editor. It’s rather like the Mad Hatter’s tea party.

In this relaxing environment, the writer introduces him to the agent (if he remembers his manners, that is), and then spends approximately two minutes talking about his book. Then — brace yourself for this — the agent responds to what the writer has said.

Possibly even while the writer was saying it. Which leads us straight into the path of another tree — or perhaps a thicket.

(10) Few pitchers are comfortable enough with their pitches not feel thrown off course by follow-up questions.

Oh, you thought it was an accident that I’ve kept bringing up this possibility every few days throughout Pitchingpalooza? Au contraire, mon frÃ¨re: I was poking you in the ribs during practice so you would develop the sure-footedness not to lose your balance during the performance.

If a writer is prepared to have an actual conversation about her book, this part of the pitch meeting can be, if not actually pleasant, then at least informative. The agent might ask a question or two, to try to figure out how the manuscript might fit into his agency’s current needs; at this point, a writer may feel free to ask questions about the agency or the market for your type of book as well.

But I’m not going to lie to you — sometimes, the agent’s first response is to say that she doesn’t handle that type of book, or that kind of story isn’t selling well right now, or any of a million other reasons that she isn’t going to ask to see pages. (Yes, they will usually tell you why; generic pitch rejections are not as common as form-letter rejections.)

Either way, at some point in the meeting, the agent is going to tell the writer whether the book sounds like it would interest her as a business proposition. She’s not saying whether she liked it, mind you — whether she thinks she can sell it.

You will be a much, much happier pitcher if you cling to that particular distinction like an unusually tenacious leech. Not to mention steering clear of our next obstacle…

(11) Far too many pitchers labor under the false impression that if an agent or editor likes a pitch, s/he will snap up the book on the spot. In reality, the agent or editor is going to want to read the manuscript first.

Believing otherwise only makes aspiring writers unhappy. It sounds like a truism, I know, but realistic expectations are the most important things a writer can carry into a pitch meeting.

In that spirit, let me alert you to two things that will not happen under any circumstances during your pitch meeting, no matter how good your pitch is (or even your platform): the agentâ€™s signing you on the spot, without reading your work, or an editorâ€™s saying, â€œI will buy this book,â€ just because he happens to like the pitch. If you walk into your pitch meeting expecting either of these outcomes — and scores of writers do — even a positive response is going to feel like a disappointment.

Let me repeat that, because itâ€™s vital to your happiness: contrary to common writerly fantasy, no reputable agent will offer representation on a pitch alone. Nothing can be settled until sheâ€™s had a chance to see your writing, period. And no viable promise exists between a pitcher and an agent or editor until both parties sign a formal contract documenting it.

Donâ€™t feel bad, even for a nanosecond, if you have ever thought otherwise: the implied promise of instant success is the underlying logical fallacy of the verbal pitch. There are plenty of good writers who donâ€™t describe their work well aloud, and even more who can speak well but do not write well.

The practice of verbal pitching is undermined by these twin facts — and yet conference after conference, year after year, aspiring writers are lead to believe that they will be discovered, signed by an agent, and lead off to publication fame and fortune after a simple spoken description of their books.

It just doesnâ€™t work that way, I’m afraid. Chant it with me now, long-term readers: the purpose of the formal pitch is not to induce a decision on the spot on the strength of the premise alone, but to get the agent to ask you to send pages so she can see for herself what a good writer you are.

Anything more, from an interesting conversation to praise for your premise, is icing on the cake: it’s nice if it’s on the menu, of course, but not essential to provide a satisfying dessert to the pitching meal.

So once again, I beg you, donâ€™t set yourself up to be shattered: keep your expectations realistic. Professionally, what you really want to get out of this meeting is the cake, not the frosting. Here is a realistic best-case scenario:

If the agent is interested by your pitch, she will hand you her business card and ask you to send some portion of the manuscript — usually, the first chapter, the first 50 pages, or for nonfiction, the book proposal. If sheâ€™s very, very enthused, she may ask you to mail the whole thing.

Mail is the operative term here. A request to see pages should never be construed as an invitation to hand her the whole thing on the spot.

Seriously. Not even if you happen to have a complete copy in the backpack at your feet.

Why? Well, manuscripts are heavy; agents almost universally prefer to have them mailed or e-mailed) rather than to carry them onto a plane. (If you think that your tome will not make a significant difference to the weight of a carry-on bag, try carrying a ream of paper in your shoulder bag for a few hours.)

Yes, I know: you have probably heard other pitching teachers — ones who got their agents a long time ago, for the most part, or who have not tried to land an agent recently — urge you to lug around a couple of complete copies of your book. It’s not even all that uncommon for conference brochures to recommend this method. This is WILDLY outdated advice, sort of like advising a 16-year-old nervous about taking her driver’s license test to bring along a buggy whip, in case the horse gets restless.

Just say neigh. No one is going to fault you for not pulling a manuscript out of your hip pocket.

At most, the agent may ask on the spot if you have a writing sample with you, but trust me, he will have a few pages in mind, not 300. If you’d like to be prepared for this eventuality, the first five pages of a book is a fairly standard writing sample. You could also use the first few pages of a favorite scene.

In the extremely unlikely event that the agent asks for more right away, murmur a few well-chosen words about how flattered you are by his interest, and offer to pop anything he wants into the mail as soon as it’s feasible.

In the interests of covering the gamut of reasonable expectations, I’m afraid I must, at least briefly, take us on a walking tour of the other logical possibility: it’s imperative to understand what a no means as well.

(I’d number that, too, but I’ve run out of tree pictures. What, you thought they just grew on…oh, never mind.)

When an agent or editor says, â€œWell, thatâ€™s not for me,â€ it is not always because the story is a bad one, or the pitch was incoherent (although pitch-hearers routinely encounter both): it is very frequently because they donâ€™t handle that type of book, or a similar book just bombed, or someone who canâ€™t stand family sagas has just been promoted to publisher, orâ€¦

Getting the picture? Rejection is very, very seldom personal — at least from the point of view of the rejection-bestower. Try not to take it as if it is.

Regardless of the outcome, remember to thank the agent or editor for his or her time. Politeness always counts in this industry, so do be nice, even if it turns out that the agent simply doesnâ€™t represent your kind of book. (Trust me — if this is the case, the agent will tell you so right away. For a fuller discussion of how and why mismatched meetings happen and how to handle them, please see my earlier post on the subject.)

Is your mind reeling, trying to picture this situation in full and vivid detail? Good; that means you’re grasping its complexity.

If you find yourself interrupted mid-pitch by a terse, “Sorry, but I don’t represent that kind of book,” express regret BRIEFLY — and ask for recommendations for other agents to approach with your work. Chances are pretty good that she will know all of the agents attending; wouldn’t you like to be able to begin a hallway pitch with, “Excuse me, but agent Selective Notforme recommended that I speak with you. Would you have a moment to hear my pitch?”

Whatever you do, don’t panic; you can avoid the wicked trees with relative ease. Over the next few posts, I am going to give you a template for presenting your story — fictional or not — in a vivid, exciting, memorable manner. I know that this prospect is daunting, but believe me, youâ€™re gaining the skills to pull this off beautifully.

Is it me, or did someone assume that the folks driving the delivery trucks needed just a tad more prompting about where to drop those packages than a reasonable person might in fact need? Wouldn’t everyone’s life have been a whole lot simpler if the manager of this facility just sprung to have a sign made that would blare LOOK — IF YOU HAVE A DELIVERY, COME DOWN THIS ROAD. EVERYONE ELSE SHOVE OFF or some similarly blunt and unambiguous statement?

You know me, folks — I’m a huge fan of clarity. (Oh, that didn’t occur to you during last January’s 23-part series on how to format a book manuscript? Next winter, it will be 24 parts — a reader asked a really good question in the archives.) I’m also, when it comes to hallway pitching, a big fan of writers’ being absolutely clear on where and when it is and is not appropriate to accost an agent in a hallway (or bar) at a writers’ conference, politely ask if s/he could spare thirty seconds, and give the shortened version of your pitch known as the elevator speech.

Where is particularly important. And not only because the single most frequently-expressed concern writers have about hallway pitching is appearing rude.

It’s not surprising that first-time pitchers tend to be worried about this — a hefty percentage of the information on conference pitching floating around out there consist of some form of there are agents and editors who just hate it when a writer comes up to them at a conference and pitches a book without an appointment. Therefore, all agents and editors must hate it. Even if a writer happens to find herself seated next to the agent of her dreams at a rubber chicken luncheon, under no circumstances should she even consider preparing a coherent answer to the friendly question, “So what do you write?”

I get that fear; honestly, I do. If you happen to have heard an agent say point-blank in an interview that he hates being buttonholed in hallways, by all means, do not buttonhole him in hallways. But to assume that all agents and editors share identical opinions on this subject is to fall into the same trap that aspiring writers so often do about querying and submission: it doesn’t take very many repetitions for a single agent’s personal preference, expressed on a conference dais or on a blog, to get magnified by that great game of Telephone we call the Internet into a dictum ostensibly crafted to be applicable to every pitching opportunity, anytime, anywhere: thou shalt not pitch at all outside a scheduled pitch meeting — and if the conference organizers schedule you for an appointment with someone who does not represent your kind of book, well, too bad. Better luck at next year’s expensive conference.

I’ve spoken at some length in this series about the vast difference between a polite, professional pitch — one that includes delightful and emollient phrases like, “Excuse me, may I disturb you for a moment?” “You mentioned at the agents’ forum that you represent books like mine, and I could not obtain an appointment with you,” and/or “Thank you very much for your time. I shall be going now.” — and the kind of rude, blustery pitch that most hallway pitch-haters have in mind when they express negative opinions about it. While it might be safe to draw a general conclusion about the inadvisability of being rude to any stranger one wants to approach to ask any favor, it seems like overkill (rather like the signage above) to swear off the possibility of making a connection with an agent who might love your work because some other agent got offended once. It just isn’t logical.

But it makes a whole lot more sense if one bears in mind the possibility that the original, “Ooh, I hate it when aspiring writers stop me in the hallway to pitch,” statement was part of a sentence that continued, “when I am trying to race to the bathroom,” does it not? And who could blame the agent — or indeed, any agent — for feeling that way?

I suspect, though, that the primary appeal of the surprisingly pervasive conference circuit truism against hallway pitching is not so much its underlying logic as its implicit permission — nay, admonition — for a would-be pitcher at a conference not muster the courage to walk up to that agent who is three feet away and ask politely to pitch. For the nervous, the ostensible ban on hallway pitching is a virtual Get Out of Pitching Free card, relieving them of the obligation to try to find an agent via a face-to-face approach.

Unfortunately, many literary contest winners and finalists regard their status (and the fact that at many conferences that give out such awards, winners and placers are singled out for public praise, always delightful) as a Get Out of Pitching Free card, too. They expect — wrongly, usually, but not without reason — that having done so well in the contest sponsored by the same organization that is throwing the conference, the agents and editors in attendance would seek them out, not the other way around. Or at least that the conference’s organizers would go out of their way to throw contest winners and agents who might snap ‘em up together in the same room.

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but this happens surprisingly seldom. Most of the time, contest winners and finalists are given no more pitching opportunities than other conference attendees, and it’s far from the norm that contest winners are automatically mobbed by agents. The latter are usually more receptive to winners and finalists, but by and large, it’s the writer’s responsibility to walk up and make that connection.

Which generally entails — wait for it — giving a hallway pitch.

I say this, incidentally, not just as the writers’ booster who often ends up holding contest-winners’ hands at the end of the conference as they say over and over again, “I can’t believe that no agent asked me to submit pages!” I also say this as a writer who has actually been in this position. When I won my first big award for my memoir, I was lucky: the president of the award-granting organization actually did corral yours truly and the winner of the main fiction award, lecture us on the importance of not wasting any or all of the pitching opportunities that the rest of the conference would afford, and herded us into a party with a couple of dozen agents.

We both pitched more or less non-stop for the rest of the conference. Fortunately, I had come prepared for it: several friends of mine had won similar contests, so I had been on the receiving end of many a pep talk. I walked out of it with more than a dozen requests for pages. As a direct result, I had the luxury of choosing between offers from several agents.

How many requests do you think I would have generated had I not pitched like a fiend? Ask the winners from subsequent years, the ones who did not heed the president’s pep talk. I’ve ended up holding their hands at the end of conferences, too.

I’m bringing this up not to gloat about my success, but because not all contest winners and finalists were as lucky as I was to know that it was my job, not the attending agents’, to take advantage of that first-place ribbon fluttering from my name tag. I’m hoping my experience will believe me when I tell you a basic truth of conference pitching: while the pitch you are bold enough to make might get rejected, the pitch you never work up nerve to give will certainly be rejected — by you.

Please, contest winners and finalists, do not remain passive here: although contest wins are undoubtedly excellent Eye-Catching Query Letter Candy (ECQLC), at no place or time will your having done so well in that contest be as easy to parlay into a conversation with an agent as when that agent has just seen you handed a ribbon. How might a savvy contest winner initiate such a conversation? How about like this: “Excuse me, but could you spare me a moment? I’ve just won Award X for my book, and you mentioned at the agents’ forum that you represent work in that book category. Would you be interested in hearing a quick pitch?”

I can already hear those of you whose entries did not do quite so well breathing a sigh of relief. “Okay, Anne,” the time-conscious cry, “that lets me out. Unless I just happen to fall into conversation with an agent — if, say, someone digs a large pit in the middle of a conference center’s hallway and we both tumble into it at the same time — probably won’t be pitching. But even assuming that I’m willing to prepare a pitch for that particular eventuality, I’m not going to memorize two different speeches. If the elevator speech is so effective at piquing interest, why shouldn’t I just use it as my pitch in my meetings with agents and editors? Since I’m already crunched for time to write, let alone to find an agent, why do I need to invest the time in preparing more than one conference pitch?”

The short answer: so you can be flexible. As I pointed out last time, you never know when — or where — you may end up pitching.

The long answer: let’s face it, it’s not as though simply memorizing a pitch, be it 3-sentence or 2-minute, is sufficient to prepare a writer for a meeting with an agent or editor who might be interested in the book. In fact, a pretty good argument could be made for not memorizing either, but reading one’s pitch from a handy piece of paper, index card, etc., to avoid the glassy-eyed, zombie-like delivery that regurgitation of memorized material.

Besides, as intrepid reader Dave likes to point out each time we discuss pitching (and bless you for it, Dave), a full-scale pitch is an interactive process, not a speech declaimed to an audience who can only clap or boo at the end. If an agent or editor likes your hallway or full pitch, she’s probably going to ask some questions.

Perhaps — and this comes as a substantial shock to most first-time pitchers — even DURING your pitch. Do you really want to be caught tongue-tied and unable to speak coherently about your book?

Stick your head between your knees until the dizziness induced by that last image passes. I’ll wait.

That’s why I’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying to nudge all of you away from the all-too-common notion of the three-line pitch, practiced over and over as if they were lines in a play. If you concentrate too much on the words themselves, and the short amount of time you have to say them, it’s too easy to freeze up when an unexpected question knocks you off script.

Call me zany, but in my experience, helping people learn to talk about their work professionally and comfortably in a broad variety of contexts works far better in practice than ordering people to write, memorize, and blurt a specific number of lines of text.

The rules lawyers out there aren’t satisfied with those excellent reasons, though, are they? “But Anne,” I hear some of you protest, “I can always add to my pitch on the fly, but I can hardly subtract from it. So why wouldn’t I be best off just preparing the 30-second version and using it no matter where I’m called upon to pitch?”

Okay, okay, I’ll admit it: a lot of people do use the 3-sentence elevator speech as their only pitch; to be fair, it has been known to work, just as hallway pitches work.

Just let me ask you a couple of questions: a 30-second pitch leaves quite a bit of a 10-minute appointment unused, doesn’t it? And why would you want to trade an opportunity to say MORE about your book for a format that forces you to say LESS?

I have another, more strategic reason for advising you to prepare both a short and a long pitch: not all conferences are equally open to hallway pitching. Especially, I’ve noticed, the ones that charge would-be pitchers per pitching appointment. Not too astonishing, I suppose.

Brace yourself, because I’m about to be subversive again: my experience has been that even at pay-for-pitch conferences, a brave writer can pretty much always buttonhole an agent or two after an agents’ forum or in the lunch line. It’s pretty difficult for conference-organizers to prevent any extra-appointment chance encounters between agents and the writers who came to the conference to pitch to them.

However, even at some conferences that don’t charge by the appointment, the organizers do try to discourage hallway pitching. I’ve seen many a conference brochure that featured rhetoric telling attendees that it is always rude to pitch outside a formal appointment, for example, or that forbade attendees to switch appointments after their assigned agents announced from a dais that they’re no longer accepting a particular kind of book.

Other conferences offer only a small handful of appointment times on a first-come, first-served basis, so late registrants are left with only the options of hallway pitching or not pitching at all. It’s also not at all uncommon for agents and editors to be whisked away to private parties or hospitality suites, so that they are seldom seen in the hallways for accosting purposes.

Seldom seen sober, at any rate (allegedly). Not much point in pitching to someone who thinks you’re just one of the dancing pink elephants.

Even when the rules and/or schedule do not discourage casual pitching, it can require significant bravery to place oneself at the right place at the right time. Even at fairly inclusive conferences, attendees often report feeling like comparative outcasts, unwelcome at the luncheon tables where the bigwigs hobnob. I’ve been to many a conference where the organizers and invited guests sat on one end of a banquet hall, and the paying attendees on the other.

Heck, I stopped by a conference (which shall remain nameless) a couple of years back where the visiting literati were whisked off their respective airplanes, driven immediately to a party at a local NYT bestselling author’s house for abundant merry-making, and then plied with alcohol so steadily throughout the course of the conference that the following Monday morning, one of the agents e-mailed me from New York to ask what had happened over the weekend. Rumor has it that some of the invited guests did not even show up for scheduled a.m. pitch meetings.

Which, I imagine, played some havoc with those pitchers whose assigned pitchees did not appear.

My point is, writers often pay a lot to attend these conferences, yet find themselves with relatively few pitching opportunities — and not always the ones they expected to have. Sometimes, a writer has to be pretty creative in order to snag those precious few moments for pitching, at least without coming across as obnoxious.

This is a wonderful post! I especially like the advice on what to do in the case that you’re paired with an agent who doesn’t represent your genre; which I had no idea could happen.

I do find one part of this post confusing, though. I have read on the internet (agent’s blogs, mostly) of how much agents despise being cornered and pitched to in places like elevators, hallways, bars, etc, yet you seem to be saying that this is okay. Is there a certain way to go about pitching in an elevator (for example) that would help an agent be more open to the pitch?

I find this question excellent — rather than passively accepting that what I’ve been advising is true, Penelope has thought it over, weighed advice from a variety of sources, and asked for clarification. This is a great strategy when dealing with anyone who has been immersed in the biz for a good, long while — as counter-intuitive as its ins and outs may be, once one gets used to them, their underlying logic can start to seem obvious, believe it or not.

Bear that in mind the next time you hear confusing pronouncements from the dais at a literary conference, please.

Back to the matter at hand: Penelope is quite right that there are some agents out there who hate, loathe, and detest aspiring writers asking to pitch outside scheduled appointments. Perhaps because they’ve never been in the position of a writer assigned to meet with an inappropriate match, these agents don’t believe that a polite writer would ever accost them in a hallway.

Fortunately, the relative few who feel this way — and they are few, at least amongst agents who habitually go to writers’ conferences — tend to be quite vocal about it. They post it on their websites; they announce it from the conference dais; they write articles and give interviews about it.

Thus, they have good reason to be insulted if an aspiring writer walks up to them and just starts pitching: they could hardly have made their preferences clearer. Approaching them on the fly, then, is every bit as likely to offend as picking up the phone and cold-calling an agent instead of sending a query letter. Or querying an agency that states on its website or in the standard agency guides that it is not currently accepting queries. The result of ignoring these stated preferences will be the same: instant rejection.

So here is my advice: do not, under any circumstances, attempt to pitch informally to an agent who has ever stated publicly that s/he abhors it.

How can a writer new to the biz avoid this faux pas, you ask? At the risk of repeating myself, do your homework. Performing a simple Google search on each attending agent before you head off to the conference should turn up any statements on the subject. If not, listen closely to what the various agents have to say at the agents’ forum.

Chances are, though, that you won’t turn up too many hallway-haters; it’s a common enough practice that folks who are seriously turned off by it tend to avoid the conference experience altogether. (Hey, it’s stressful for the pitch-hearers, too — listening to that many people’s hopes and dreams is mighty tiring.) After all, agents go to conferences in order to pick up clients, and it honestly is a waste of everyone’s time if they only hear pitches from the 10 writers who happen to be assigned formal appointments with them, if there are 75 writers there who write what they’re looking to represent.

Especially if 5 of those appointments turn out to be mismatches, where writers are pitching types of books that they do not represent.

If a writer’s polite about approaching, it’s usually fine. That’s a big if, though — unfortunately, there are PLENTY of rude aspiring writers up there who will simply walk up to an agent they’ve never met before and start launching into a pitch, without so much as a “Hello” or “Could you spare me thirty seconds to tell you about my book?”

Typically, when agents complain about informal pitches, that’s the kind they’re talking about, by the way, not the nice folks who approach them respectfully. You can’t really blame them for resenting the rude approach: anyone would despise being accosted right after he had just swallowed a mouthful of pasta or as she was unlocking the door to her hotel room.

Yes, it happens — but I cling firmly to the belief that none of my lovely readers would be that obnoxious.

Use your common sense, be polite at all times, and be prepared for the possibility that any given agent may have a personal pet peeve about being disturbed in some specific locale. As far as I have been able to tell in a couple of decades of going to writers’ conferences, the only UNIVERSALLY agreed-upon do-not-pitch zone is the bathroom. Other than that, whether the smoking area or the make-up mirror in the ladies’ lounge is off-limits honestly is a personal preference.

Hey, not everyone considers that part of the bathroom per se. I would err on the side of caution and avoid pitching at all between the WOMEN’S sign and the stalls, but hey, that’s me.

The trick to approaching gently lies in both timing and courtesy. If an agent is lying prone on a hallway bench with a wet towel over her face, clutching her head and moaning about a migraine, that might not be the best time to try to catch her eye, for instance. Nor is the moment just after she walks out of the room where she has been listening to pitches all day, or when she is deep in conversation with an author she hasn’t seen in 25 years.

Remember, she is under no obligation to agree to hear you out. Listening to an informal pitch is a favor, and should be treated as such.

So don’t, for instance, walk up to an agent who is laughing with her friends, tap her on the shoulder, and start talking about your book. Instead, walk up to the dais after she’s given a talk, wait politely until it’s your turn, and say something along the lines of:

“Excuse me, but I was enthralled by how you talked about your clients. I couldn’t get a pitch appointment with you, but I think you may be interested in my book. May I give you my thirty-second pitch? Or if now is not a good time, could we set up an appointment later?”

Hard to find that offensive. It clearly gives the agent the opportunity to say no, but still makes it flatteringly plain that you are taking her time seriously. Works in an elevator, too, as long as the would-be pitcher remembers that no really does mean no.

And no, in response to what some timorous souls out there just thought very loudly indeed, none of this is particularly pushy; it’s being smart about promoting your work. By preparing to be able to speak about your book in a variety of contexts, social and official both, you can be ready to take advantage of that chance meeting with the agent with whom you found it impossible to make a formal appointment.

In, say, an elevator.

The other way a hallway pitcher can avoid seeming rude is to keep the hallway pitch BRIEF. If you ask for 30 seconds of the agent’s time, do not take up more unless he asks follow-up questions.

I’m quite serious about this: don’t go overboard. This is not the appropriate time to give your full-fledged 2-minute pitch; save that for a scheduled pitch meeting or, if you’re lucky, the appointment the agent you caught in the hallway agreed to give you later in the conference.

This is where the formula we discussed last time will save your bacon:

MAGIC FIRST 100 WORDS + ELEVATOR SPEECH = HALLWAY PITCH.

If you follow this prescription (oh, there I go again; the book doctor is apparently in), you should not go over the promised 30 seconds. That means that you won’t have to keep checking your watch while you’re talking.

See why I’ve been so adamant about urging you to prepare an elevator speech in advance? An audience granted at the last minute is no time to wing it.

Out come the broken record and the dead horse again: by emphasizing the 3-sentence pitch to the exclusion of all others, I think the standard sources of writerly advice have left first-time pitchers ill-prepared to address those other vital issues involved in a good pitch, such as where the book will sit in Barnes & Noble, who the author thinks will read it, why the target market will find it compelling…

In short, all of the information contained in the magic first 100 words.

All that being said, if an agent has stated publicly (on an agent’s panel, for instance) that he hates informal pitches, steer clear — but don’t necessarily write that agent off as a possibility. Instead, send a query letter after the conference, beginning, “I enjoyed your talk at Conference X, and since I was not lucky enough to obtain a pitch appointment with you…”

But whatever you do, don’t swear off hallway pitching just because a few agents dislike being pitched informally. Not everything every agent says is applicable to all agents — nor do the agents who make such pronouncements necessarily expect everything they say in public on the subject to become codified as The Law Eternal.

Sometimes, a personal preference is just that: personal. By preparing yourself to talk about your work in a variety of contexts, you will be substantially less likely to be caught with nothing coherent to say when the pitching opportunity of your dreams presents itself.

Trust me, you will be happier in the long run if you don’t self-reject your pitch. Try it on the agent of your dreams; the results might be spectacular.

Oh, I’m sensing some impatient seat-shifting out there again, amn’t I? “I get it, Anne,” some of you say, rolling your eyes, “you believe that I’ll be happier in the long run if I prepare to be able to give my pitch in a house, with a mouse, in a hat, near a rat, and anywhere else that an agent with a successful track record selling books in my category happens to be. Fine — I’m going to practice my elevator speech AND my pitch. But I’m hardly going to forget my own name or the title of my book. I do have social skills — I don’t seriously need to practice introducing myself, do I?”

I’m sure that you have social skills that are the pride and joy or your mother under normal circumstances, but hear me out, please: while it may seem a tad silly to have to practice saying your own name, or to remind yourself to mention that your book is a novel (or a memoir, or a nonfiction book), most writers are nervous when they pitch.

I know; shocking.

Practice will help you remember to hit the important points, no matter how brief or how strange the locale of your pitching experience. Especially if you practice saying them in a number of different ways.

Yes, you did extrapolate correctly: I am seriously suggesting that you do dry runs where you have only a minute, only thirty seconds, five minutes, etc., in order to get comfortable talking about your work. And I’m not just saying that because I once found myself stuck in the same tiny airport with a very famous agent for five hours, waiting for the same flight.

True story. Nice guy.

But surprise openings are not the only reason practicing rolling with the punches is a good idea. You’d be amazed (at least I hope you would) at how many first-time pitchers come dashing into their scheduled pitch appointments, so fixated on blurting those pre-ordained three sentences that they forget to:

(a) introduce themselves to the agent or editor, like civilized beings,

(b) mention whether the book is fiction or nonfiction,

(c) indicate whether the book has a title, or

(d) all of the above.

I find this sad: these are intelligent people, for the most part, but their too-rigid advance preparation has left them as tongue-tied and awkward as wallflowers at a junior high school dance.

We’ve all been there, right?

And don’t even get me started on the sweat-soaked silence that can ensue after the 3-sentence pitcher has gasped it all out, incontinently, and has no more to say. In that dreadful lull, the agent sits there, blinking so slowly that the pitcher is tempted to take a surreptitious peek at his watch, to make sure that time actually is moving forward at a normal clip, or stick a pin in the agent, to double-check that she isn’t some sort of emotionless android with its battery pack on the fritz.

“And?” the automaton says impatiently after approximately 150 years of silence. “Are you done?”

Call me unorthodox, but I don’t think this is a desirable outcome for you.

But that doesn’t mean that you should just prepare a hallway pitch and trust your luck to be able to handle questions about it for the rest of your pitch appointment. You will be happier in that meeting if you have prepared at least the outline of a 2-minute pitch. (And yes, Virginia, we are going to talk about that next time.)

And, by the way, you should time it as you say it out loud, to make sure it can be said in under two minutes without leaving you so breathless that oxygen will have to be administered immediately afterward.

Why? Well, even more common than pitchers who dry up after 45 seconds are writers who talk on and on about their books in their pitch meetings so long that the agent or editor hasn’t time to ask follow-up questions. You really do want to keep your pitch to roughly two minutes (as opposed to your hallway pitch, which should be approximately 30 seconds), so that you can discuss your work with the well-connected, well-informed industry insider in front of you.

A pitch meeting is a conversation, after all, not a stump speech: you want it to start an interesting exchange, not to engender stony silence, right? Come prepared to talk about your work — and in terms that will make sense to everyone in the industry.

In a box, with a fox — or balanced in a crabapple tree with a dirt-encrusted good luck charm. (I thought I wouldn’t make you guess that time.)

Trust me, you can do this. I have faith in you.

Okay, now we’re coming up on the main course: the two-minute pitch. But that, my friends, is a subject for another day.

Thanks for the fabulous questions, Penelope and the rest of you who contacted me privately. (You’d be amazed at how often the floating voices I cite here are the result of ex parte approaches; just for the record, I vastly prefer that questions be posted as comments on the blog, so everyone may benefit from the answers.) Keep up the good work!